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RESS RELEASES 1/28/2016 2:18:59 PM | Marketwired News
Global Cyber Alliance Announces Board of Directors
2016-01-28T19:18:59+00:00
MANHATTAN, NY--(Marketwired - January 28, 2016) - President and CEO of Global Cyber Alliance (GCA), Philip Reitinger, announced GCA's global Board of Directors. The Board will direct the operations of GCA, helping it to fulfill its mission of implementing solutions to eradicate systemic cyber risks.
Reitinger announced that the Board of Directors of GCA will include Shawn Henry, Troels Oerting, Scott Charney, Yurie Ito, William Pelgrin, and himself.
GCA is an international, cross-sector not-for-profit founded on September 16, 2015 by the New York County District Attorney's Office, the City of London Police and the Center for Internet Security. GCA is unique as a global and cross-sector non-profit organization founded to "Do Something" -- to fill a gap by implementing solutions rather than to study problems and to prepare recommendations.
Philip Reitinger, who was announced as the President and CEO of GCA on January 6th, 2016, said, "GCA's Board of directors includes corporate leaders and cybersecurity experts from around the world, reflecting its global focus. These leaders will bring their extensive experience to GCA, and help ensure that the organization is focused directly on concrete action to reduce risk."
The Board is chaired by William Pelgrin, who established the GCA along with the founders. Mr. Pelgrin is former President and CEO of the Center for Internet Security and former Chief Cyber Commissioner for New York State. Pelgrin said, "As the GCA Chair, I am very excited that GCA has such an impressive international Board and CEO and President. Each of these individuals is internationally recognized for their cyber and business expertise, which will provide valuable contributions to help fulfill the GCA's mission and vision. They each have a strong commitment to make a difference for the global community."
Shawn Henry, President of CrowdStrike Services, is the retired executive assistant director of the FBI. Henry is credited with boosting the FBI's computer crime and cybersecurity investigative capabilities. He oversaw computer crime investigations spanning the globe, and posted FBI cyber experts in police agencies around the world. Henry said, "There are significant efforts in government and the private sector, but it is clear the cybersecurity problem is getting worse. I am pleased to be a part of a global effort to change that, concrete step by concrete step."
Troels Oerting, Group Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) at Barclays, has more than 35 years' experience in Law Enforcement -- the last 15 in senior management positions in Danish and International police organizations with a focus on ICT security. He is the former the Director of Danish NCIS, the National Crime Squad, SOCA and the Director of operations in the Danish Security Intelligence Service. He was also assistant Director in Europol's IMT Department, Assistant Director in Europol'
FBI WATCH DO NOT FLY LIST
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- Posts: 7721
Re: FBI WATCH DO NOT FLY LIST
State Rep. Scott Petri drops out of congressional race
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local ... _race.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Last updated: Tuesday, February 2, 2016, 1:07 AM
WASHINGTON - State Rep. Scott Petri, until recently considered the Republican favorite in the race for a Bucks County congressional seat, suddenly dropped out of the contest Monday night in favor of seeking to retain his statehouse seat.
Petri announced his decision Monday night at an endorsement screening with the Bucks County Republican Party in Northampton Township.
It came less than two weeks after Brian Fitzpatrick - brother of well-known incumbent U.S. Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick - entered the race.
Brian Fitzpatrick, a former FBI agent, has never held public office, but with his brother's name recognition, electoral success, and campaign war chest, he is seen as a formidable candidate.
Mike Fitzpatrick, a four-term Republican, is not running, citing a self-imposed term limit pledge.
"In order for us to be successful in November, it is important that we have a strong and unified party," Petri wrote in an email to supporters and post on Facebook
http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local ... _race.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Last updated: Tuesday, February 2, 2016, 1:07 AM
WASHINGTON - State Rep. Scott Petri, until recently considered the Republican favorite in the race for a Bucks County congressional seat, suddenly dropped out of the contest Monday night in favor of seeking to retain his statehouse seat.
Petri announced his decision Monday night at an endorsement screening with the Bucks County Republican Party in Northampton Township.
It came less than two weeks after Brian Fitzpatrick - brother of well-known incumbent U.S. Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick - entered the race.
Brian Fitzpatrick, a former FBI agent, has never held public office, but with his brother's name recognition, electoral success, and campaign war chest, he is seen as a formidable candidate.
Mike Fitzpatrick, a four-term Republican, is not running, citing a self-imposed term limit pledge.
"In order for us to be successful in November, it is important that we have a strong and unified party," Petri wrote in an email to supporters and post on Facebook
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7721
Re: FBI WATCH DO NOT FLY LIST
https://www.americanswhotellthetruth.or ... nk-serpico
Frank Serpico Portrait by Robert Shetterly
Frank Serpico
Retired Police Detective, Author, Lecturer: b. 1936
"A policeman’s first obligation is to be responsible to the needs of the community he serves…The problem is that the atmosphere does not yet exist in which an honest police officer can act without fear of ridicule or reprisal from fellow officers. We create an atmosphere in which the honest officer fears the dishonest officer, and not the other way around."
http://www.latimes.com/sports/nfl/la-sp ... story.html
White NYPD cop who exposed cops dealing heroin and cocaine
Frank Serpico joins black New York police group supporting Colin Kaepernick
http://newsok.com/mobster-must-serve-fu ... le/5560787
Mobster must serve full sentence despite OKC bombing revelation
NewsOK.com-
Scarpa in early March 2005 spoke to an FBI agent from Colorado about the cache but said he did not yet know the location. That agent took no action, primarily ...
http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/l ... story.html
Pebble Beach 2017: The VW van is back — but this time it's electric
VW says the new all-wheel-drive machine will be able to transport eight passengers and get up to 270 miles of all-battery range.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-plot-t ... er/5544005
MLK Day: The FBI Plot to Kill Martin Luther King: Survived Shooting, Was Murdered in Hospital by FBI
Martin Luther King was murdered in a conspiracy that was instigated by then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Review of William Pepper's Book
By Craig McKee
Global Research, July 23, 2017
This article was first published by GR on September 5, 2016
For one bright moment back in the late 1960s, we actually believed that we could change our country. We had identified the enemy. We saw it up close, we had its measure, and we were very hopeful that we would prevail. The enemy was hollow where we had substance. All of that substance was destroyed by an assassin’s bullet. – William Pepper (page 15, The Plot to Kill King)
The revelations are stunning. The media indifference is predictable.
Thanks to the nearly four-decade investigation by human rights lawyer William Pepper, it is now clear once and for all that Martin Luther King was murdered in a conspiracy that was instigated by then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and that also involved the U.S. military, the Memphis Police Department, and “Dixie Mafia” crime figures in Memphis, Tennessee. These and many more incredible details of the King assassination are contained in a trilogy of volumes by Pepper culminating with his latest and final book on the subject, The Plot to Kill King. He previously wrote Orders to Kill (1995) and An Act of State (2003).
MLK 2
With virtually no help from the mainstream media and very little from the justice system, Pepper was able to piece together what really happened on April 4, 1968 in Memphis right down to who gave the order and supplied the money, how the patsy was chosen, and who actually pulled the trigger.
Without this information, the truth about King’s assassination would have been buried and lost to history. Witnesses would have died off, taking their secrets with them, and the official lie that King was the victim of a racist lone gunman named James Earl Ray would have remained “fact.”
Instead, we know that Ray took the fall for a murder he did not commit. We know that a member of the Memphis Police Department fired the fatal shot and that two military sniper teams that were part of the 902ndMilitary Intelligence Group were sent to Memphis as back-ups should the primary shooter fail. We have access to the fascinating account of how Pepper came to meet Colonel John Downie, the man in charge of the military part of the plot and Lyndon Johnson’s former Vietnam briefer. We also learn that as part of the operation, photographs were actually taken of the shooting and that Pepper came very close to getting his hands on those photographs.
plot to kill king
Unfortunately, the mainstream media has ignored all of these revelations and continues to label Ray as King’s lone assassin. In fact, Pepper chronicles in detail how a disinformation campaign has featured the collaboration of many mainstream journalists over almost half a century. He says he suspects that those orchestrating the cover-up, which continues to this day, are no longer concerned with what he writes about the subject.
“I’m really basically harmless, I think, to the power structure,” Pepper said in an interview.
“I don’t think I threaten them, really. The control of the media is so consolidated now they can keep someone like me under wraps, under cover, forever. This book will probably never be reviewed seriously by mainstream, the story will not be aired in mainstream – they control the media. It was bad in the ’60s but nowhere near as bad as now.”
And the most stunning revelation in The Plot to Kill King – which some may question because the account is second hand – is that King was still alive when he arrived at St. Joseph’s Hospital and that he was killed by a doctor who was supposed to be trying to save his life.
“That is probably the most shocking aspect of the book, that final revelation of how this great man was taken from us,” Pepper says. (By the way, when I quote Pepper as having “said” something I mean in our interview. If I’m quoting from the book, I’ll indicate that.)
The hospital story was told to Pepper by a man named Johnton Shelby, whose mother, Lula Mae Shelby, had been a surgical aide at St. Joseph’s that night. Shelby told Pepper the story of how his mother came home the morning after the shooting (she hadn’t been allowed to go home the night before) and gathered the family together. He remembers her saying to them, “I can’t believe they took his life.”
She described chief of surgery Dr. Breen Bland entering the emergency room with two men in suits. Seeing doctors working on King, Bland commanded, “Stop working on the nigger and let him die! Now, all of you get out of here, right now. Everybody get out.”
Johnton Shelby says his mother described hearing the sound of the three men sucking up saliva into their mouths and then spitting. Lula Mae described to her family that she looked over her shoulder as she was leaving the room and saw that the breathing tube had been removed from King and that Bland was holding a pillow over his head. (The book contains the entire deposition given by Johnton Shelby to Pepper, so readers can judge for themselves whether they think Shelby is credible – as Pepper believes he is.)
Pepper and King.
William Pepper with his friend Martin Luther King.
In fact, a second invaluable source was Ron Adkins, whose father, Russell Adkins Sr., was a local Dixie Mafia gangster and conspirator in the planning of the assassination even though he died a year before it took place. Ron told Pepper he had overheard Bland, who was his family’s doctor, tell his father that if King did survive the shooting he had to be taken to St. Joseph’s and nowhere else. As Pepper describes it:
He remembers Breen Bland saying to his father, ‘If he’s not killed by the shot, just make sure he gets to St. Joseph Hospital, and we’ll make sure that he doesn’t leave.’
Ron, who was just 16 when the shooting took place, was apparently taken everywhere by his father in those days, and he was able to recount many details of what happened as the assassination was planned and carried out.
“I definitely found him credible,” Pepper says. “I found him troubled, I found him disturbed in a lot of ways by things that went on earlier in his life.”
His deposition is also contained in the book, which Pepper explains was important so that readers could judge the statements for themselves.
“What I wanted to do was to make sure that the entire deposition of these critical moments and this critical information was there, so that one could go and read the depositions and see that I was being accurate,” Pepper says.
Besides describing what he heard Bland tell his father, Ron Adkins described the many visits made to Russell Sr. by Clyde Tolson, J. Edgar Hoover’s right hand man. Known to Ron as “Uncle Clyde,” the high-level FBI official often delivered cash to the elder Adkins for jobs he and his associates would carry out on behalf of Hoover. Among those the younger Adkins said were paid to supply information about the activities of Martin Luther King were the reverends Samuel “Billy” Kyles and Jesse Jackson.
The basics of the official story
If you seek out any information from a mainstream source about James Earl Ray, you’ll find him described as the killer of Martin Luther King, just as Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan are labelled “assassins” in the murders of John and Robert Kennedy.
But once you read any or all of Pepper’s three books on the King slaying, you see very clearly that Ray is not a killer at all. Instead, he was a petty criminal who was a perfect “follower.” Like Oswald and Sirhan, Ray was set up to take the fall for an assassination that originated within the American deep state. In fact, Pepper says he’s convinced that knowledge of the plot went all the way to the top.
“The whole thing would have been part of Lyndon Johnson’s playbook,” Pepper says. “I think Johnson knew about this.”
As the official story of the shooting goes, at 5:50 p.m. on April 4, Kyles knocked on the door of room 306 of the Lorraine Motel to let King and the rest of his party know that they were running late for a planned dinner at Kyles’s home. Kyles then walked about 60 feet down the balcony where he remained even after King came out of the room at about 6 p.m. (Although Kyles has maintained ever since that he spent the last half hour in the room, Pepper has proven otherwise.)
Andrew Young and others on balcony of Lorraine motel pointing to where the shot originated while King lies at their feet. (Joseph Louw photo)
Andrew Young (left) and others on balcony of the Lorraine pointing to where the shot originated while King lies at their feet. (Joseph Louw photo)
Members of a militant black organizing group the Invaders, who were also staying in the motel because of King’s visit, were told shortly before the shooting by a member of the motel staff that their rooms would no longer being paid for by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and that they had to leave immediately. When they asked who had given this order, they were told it was Jesse Jackson. At the time of the shooting, Jackson was waiting down by the swimming pool. Ron Adkins also identified Jackson as the person who called the owners of the Lorraine Motel and demanded that King be moved from a more secure inner courtyard room to an exposed room on the second floor facing the street.
The Memphis Police Department usually formed a detail of black officers to protect King when he was in town, but did not this time. Emergency TACT support units were pulled back from the Lorraine to the fire station, which overlooked the motel. Pepper also learned that the only two black members of the Memphis Fire Department had been told the day before the shooting not to report for work the next day at the fire station. And black detective Ed Redditt was told an hour before the shooting to stay home because a threat had been made on his life.
Just about a minute after King exited his room, a single shot was fired and the bullet ripped through King’s jaw and spinal cord, dropping him immediately. The shot appeared to come from across Mulberry Street. King was rushed to hospital, where he was pronounced dead just after 7 p.m.
According to the official story, the shot was fired by Ray from the bathroom of a rooming house above a bar called Jim’s Grill, which backed on to Mulberry and faced onto South Main Street. But, as Pepper’s investigation proves, the shot actually came from the bushes located in between the rooming house and the street. In fact, the only “witness” who placed Ray at the scene was a falling-down-drunk named Charles Stephens, who later did not recognize Ray in a photograph and who cab driver James McCraw had refused to transport a short time before because he was too intoxicated.
The bushes that concealed the shooter were conveniently trimmed the day after the shooting, giving a false impression that a shooter could not have been concealed there. Several witnesses, including journalist Earl Caldwell and King’s Memphis driver, Solomon Jones, described seeing the shot come from the bushes and not from the bathroom of the rooming house as the official story states.
Another casualty of the King murder was cab driver Buddy Butler who reported that he saw a man running from the scene right after the shot, going south on Mulberry St., and jumping into a police car (this would turn out to be MPD Lieutenant Earl Clark). Butler reported this to his dispatcher and later to fellow cab driver Louie Ward. Butler was interviewed at the Yellow Cab Company later that evening by police. Ward was told the next day that Butler had either fallen, or was pushed, to his death from a speeding car on the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge.
The owner of Jim’ Grill, Loyd Jowers, would later admit to being part of the conspiracy to kill King, and he would be found responsible – along with various government agencies – for the killing in a 1999 civil lawsuit by the King family, which was represented by Pepper.
“The King family got enormous comfort out of the results of that trial and the evidence that came forward from that,” Pepper says.
Betty Spates, a waitress at Jim’s Grill and girlfriend of Jowers, says she saw him rush into the back of the Grill through the back door seconds after the shot, white as a ghost and holding a rifle, which he then wrapped in a tablecloth and hid on a shelf under the counter. He turned to her and said, “Betty, you wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, would you?” She responded, “Of course not, Loyd.” Spates, who didn’t come forward until the 1990s, also recounted that Jowers had been delivered a large sum of money right before the assassination.
James McCraw stated that Jowers had shown him a rifle the day after the shooting and told him it was the one used to kill King.
“We confronted Loyd,” Peppers explains. “We told him he was likely to be indicted if he didn’t help us, if he didn’t give more information. Jowers didn’t know there was no way the grand jury was going to indict him. All he knew was what he did, what he participated in, how much money he got for it – he got quite a large sum of money, built a taxi cab company with it, had his gambling debt with [local Mafia figure Frank] Liberto forgiven.”
Liberto, an associate of Louisiana crime boss Carlos Marcello, turned out to be involved in the assassination also. He owned a produce warehouse and one of his regular customers, John McFerren, was making his weekly shopping trip there when he overheard Liberto shout into the phone an hour before the shooting: “Shoot the son of a &!@$# on the balcony.” Nathan Whitlock and his mother, LaVada Addison Whitlock, who owned a restaurant frequented by Liberto, stated that Liberto had told them he was responsible for the King murder.
Setting up the patsy
One thing that many don’t know is that Ray was in prison in 1967, the year before the assassination, serving a 20-year sentence for a grocery store robbery in 1959. After a couple of unsuccessful escape attempts, Ray succeeded in breaking out of prison on April 23, 1967. Unknown to Ray was the fact that the escape had been orchestrated, because he had already been chosen as the patsy in the planned assassination of King, which was still a year away.
The warden of Missouri State Penitentiary was paid $25,000 by Russell Adkins Sr. to allow the escape (as confirmed by Ron Adkins). The money was delivered to Adkins by Tolson, and it was this same connection that would later be used to finance the assassination of King.
After his escape from prison, Ray went to Chicago for a few weeks where he got a job. But, worried about getting caught, he went to Canada, specifically Montreal, and took the name Eric S. Galt. His intention was to get a passport under a false name and to travel to a country from which he could not be extradited.
james earl ray
James Earl Ray spent the last 30 years of his life in prison for a murder he did not commit.
At the Neptune Bar in the Montreal dock area in August 1967, Ray met a mysterious figure who identified himself as “Raul.” Raul asked Ray to help him with a smuggling scheme, and Ray agreed. In the months ahead, Ray would do a number of jobs, including gun running, for Raul for which he was paid and given a car. Always, Ray had to wait to be contacted by Raul, who Ray said co-ordinated his activities right up until the day of the assassination.
At one point Ray was instructed to purchase a deer rifle with a scope (although Raul was not satisfied with the one he bought and made him exchange it for another). Ray was instructed to go to Memphis (he arrived April 3, 1968) and upon meeting with Raul in his motel was given the name of Jim’s Grill, where the two were to meet at 3 p.m. the next day. He also handed the rifle over to Raul and always maintained that he never saw it again.
Ray rented a room at the rooming house above Jim’s Grill (the two met the day of the assassination as planned). About an hour before the shooting, he was given money to go to the movies, but first he tried to have a tire repaired because Raul had said he wanted to use the car. But when Ray heard the sirens that followed the shooting, he got scared and left the area.
Fearing he had been set up, Ray left the country and ended up in England where he was captured on June 8, 1968 at London’s Heathrow Airport as he was trying to leave the UK. Once charged with the crime, Ray was pressured by his second lawyer, Percy Foreman, to plead guilty on the grounds that the evidence was too strong against him and Foreman was not in good health and couldn’t offer a strong defence.
“Foreman was sent in with the purpose of replacing the original lawyers,” Pepper says.
Foreman offered Ray $500 to get another lawyer if he pleaded guilty and even put this in writing. Ray would regret accepting this offer for the rest of his life. He tried unsuccessfully to rescind the guilty plea and get a trial for the next 30 years, finally dying in prison of cancer in 1998.
Pepper becomes convinced of Ray’s innocence
It was 10 years after the assassination before Pepper would even consider meeting with Ray. He had taken for granted at first that Ray was the assassin, but he was encouraged to meet him by Rev. Ralph Abernathy, who had succeeded King as President of the SCLC. Abernathy had remained unsatisfied with the official account of the shooting.
In the book, Pepper describes his first meeting with Ray in 1978 and how he quickly came to believe that Ray had not been the shooter and that the case was essentially still unsolved. It wasn’t until 1988 before Pepper became certain that Ray had not played any knowing part in the conspiracy, and at that point he agreed to represent him, which he did until his death.
Purveyors of the official story of the assassination have always claimed that Raul was an invention of Ray’s, and mainstream media accounts refer to this question as still unanswered even though Pepper not only found witnesses who described their connections to Raul, he actually found Raul himself with the help of witness Glenda Grabow (Pepper learned that his last name was Coelho). She identified Raul as someone she had known in Houston in 1963 and who around 1974, in a fit of rage, had implicated himself in the King assassination right before raping her. Grabow also identified Jack Ruby as someone who she had seen with Raul in 1963. This fascinating story is recounted both in An Act of State and The Plot to Kill King.
One of the most intriguing things to come out of both of these books is the account of a young FBI agent named Don Wilson who after the assassination was sent to check out a white Mustang with Alabama plates (Ray drove a white Mustang) that had been abandoned and that was thought to be connected to the assassination. Wilson opened the car door and some papers fell out. He examined them later and found a torn-out piece of a 1963 Dallas, Texas telephone directory. Written on the page was the name “Raul” and the initial “J” and a phone number, which turned out to be that of a Las Vegas night club run by Jack Ruby, the man who had shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas police station. A second piece of paper had a list of names with amounts of money beside each. Wilson decided to hold on to this evidence, fearing it would disappear forever if he turned it in. He held on to it for 29 years before making it available to Pepper and the King family.
The shooter revealed
Another incredible revelation in The Plot to Kill King is the identity of the man who appears to have fired the fatal shot. Pepper learned his identity from Lenny B. Curtis, who was a custodian at the Memphis Police Department rifle range. Curtis told Pepper this in 2003, and Pepper recorded a deposition with him but kept it confidential out of fear for Curtis’s life. Only after his death in 2013 did Pepper reveal what Curtis had said – that the shooter was Memphis police officer Frank Strausser.
“We had to be very careful about [Curtis’s safety],” Pepper says.
Curtis said to Pepper in his deposition that he heard Strausser say about King four or five months before the assassination that somebody was going to “. . . blow his motherfucking brains out.” He also described that Strausser had practised in the rifle range with a particular rifle that had been brought in four or five days earlier by a member of the fire department. That fireman had shown the rifle to Curtis and asked, “How would you like that scoundrel, that baby there?” When Curtis said it look like any other rifle, he replied, “No, this is a special one; that baby is special.” Lenny remembered that on the day of the assassination, Strausser spent the whole day practicing with it. (Strausser has given several conflicting accounts of where he was and what he was doing that day.)
After the assassination, Curtis says he was followed and intimidated by Strausser. Pepper writes:
Lenny said that he subsequently became aware that strange things were happening around him. His gas was strangely turned on once when he was about to enter his house. He had lit a cigarette, but as he opened the door he smelled gas and quickly put out the cigarette. A strange Lincoln was occasionally parked across the street from his apartment house. He was frightened. One morning when the car was there, he got into his own car and quickly drove off, and the strange car pulled out and followed him. He managed to see the driver. It was Strausser.
In the book, Pepper describes how he came to meet with Strausser, who he describes as a committed and devoted racist.
“He had no respect for black people at all,” Pepper says. “He wasn’t explicit about his racism. But he was not at all sympathetic to what Martin King was all about.”
In the hope of prompting an admission, Pepper lied and told him that he had been implicated in the killing by Loyd Jowers – but Strausser didn’t take the bait. Pepper also told Strausser that the footprints found in the bushes after the shooting were from size 13 shoes (which they were). Then he asked him about the size of his feet:
“He had a bit of a grin on his face, and he said ‘13 large,’” Pepper says.
Pepper also arranged to have cab driver Nathan Whitlock, who Strausser knew, tell him that there was a good possibility that he (Strausser) would be indicted for the shooting. He responded: “What are they going to indict me for, something I did 30 years ago?” Then he caught himself and added, “Or something I knew about 30 years ago?”
A threat to the powers that be
As Pepper explains, King was not only hated by the establishment as he rose to prominence in the 1960s, he was feared. Not only did he have the ability to move large numbers of people with his message of peace and tolerance, but he had designs on a political career. According to Pepper, King was planning to run for president on a third-party ticket with fellow anti-war activist Dr. Benjamin Spock. He was also causing panic in powerful circles because he intended to bring hundreds of thousands of poor people to an encampment in Washington, D.C. in the spring of 1968 to bring attention to the plight of the poor.
“They were terrified that the anger level when [the demonstrators] were not going to get what they wanted was going to rise to such a point where Martin was going to lose control of that group and the more radical among them would take it over and they’d have a revolution,” Pepper explains. “And they didn’t have the troops to put it down. That was a real fear that the Army had. And I think it was a justifiable fear.”
King would also have posed an increasing threat to the political establishment because he intended to become much more vocal in his opposition to the Vietnam War. He had been influenced by an article and photos by Pepper called, “The Children of Vietnam,” which was published in Ramparts Magazine in January 1967 and later reprinted in Look magazine. (The man who published the piece in Look, Bill Atwood, actually told Pepper he received a visit from former New York governor and ambassador to the Soviet Union Averill Harriman who passed on a message from President Johnson that he would appreciate it if Atwood never published anything by Pepper.)
Beyond King’s importance as a powerful force for justice, peace, and equality, he was also Pepper’s friend. And the lawyer/journalist had to deal with that loss as he sought the truth about who really killed King and fought for justice for the man falsely accused of his murder. He writes:
For me, this is a story rife with sadness, replete with massive accounts of personal and public deception and betrayal. Its revelations and experiences have produced in the writer a depression stemming from an unavoidable confrontation with the depths to which human beings, even those subject to professional codes of ethics, have fallen. In addition, there is an element of personal despair that has resulted from this long effort, which has made me even question the wisdom of undertaking this task. (page xiv, The Plot to Kill King)
But he did undertake it, and we should all be grateful that he did.
The original source of this article is Truth and Shadows
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Public Relations Review
Volume 23, Issue 1, Spring 1997, Pages 11-30
Public Relations Review
A quantitative description of FBI public relations
. Author links open the author workspace.Dirk C.Gibson
Show more
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0363-8111(97)90003-5Get rights and content
Abstract
Of all federal government agencies in the U.S. from the 1930's to the 1980's, the Federal Bureau of Investigation probably had the most successful media relations program. The Bureau's leaders seemed to be masters at getting good publicity and avoiding bad.
By describing a quantitative analysis of the FBI's publicity over that 50-year period, this article attempts to show why those efforts were so successful. It identifies the themes that typified the verbal component of Bureau publicity, and the broad spectrum of mass communication channels that were tapped.
http://policecrime.proboards.com/thread ... -treatment
04/15/2006 - Las Vegas - An FBI agent who pleaded guilty to drunken driving has sued the maker of his pickup because it caught fire after he passed out behind the wheel.
Officer Robert Clymer, who was involved in a high-profile investigation of the Crazy Horse Too strip club, had a blood-alcohol content of 0.306 percent, nearly four times the current legal limit, and was unconscious when Las Vegas firefighters pulled him from his burning truck on Jan. 29, 2005.
The 2004 Chevrolet Silverado had jumped a curb outside a gated community in northwest Las Vegas and began to smoke and caught fire after the engine had been running for a long time, according to a Las Vegas police report.
Police found an empty 25-ounce bottle of Captain Morgan rum on the passenger seat and a SIG Sauer 9 mm pistol in the truck's cab.
F.B.I Agent Clymer, 41, was cited for misdemeanor drunken driving and sent to University Medical Center because of complications from smoke inhalation and intoxication, the report said.
He later pleaded guilty to the charge in Las Vegas Municipal Court and was given a suspended 30-day jail term and 48 hours of community service.
During sentencing in November, Clymer's lawyer said his client wanted to take responsibility for his actions.
"Public officials make mistakes," attorney Gary Booker said. "With public officials, we expect them to own up to their mistakes and correct them. That is exactly what happened in this case."
Two weeks later, F.B.I Agent Clymer filed a product liability lawsuit against General Motors and Bill Heard Chevrolet, who had sold him the truck. He was seeking more than $33,000 in medical bills and nearly $11,000 in lost wages.
The lawsuit says F.B.I Agent Clymer stopped on the side of the road to make a telephone call. He left the engine running and the car in park.
F.B.I Agent Clymer then "somehow lost consciousness" and the truck "somehow produced a heavy smoke that filled the passenger cab," the suit said.
Lawyers for Clymer, GM and Bill Heard Chevrolet did not return phone calls seeking comment. Clymer did not return a phone message left at his office.
The lawsuit was filed about six weeks after Clymer and his wife, FBI secretary Tracy Clymer, filed for bankruptcy. In their bankruptcy papers, the couple said they owed creditors more than $580,700, including nearly $122,000 in credit card debt.
Robert Clymer, a 20-year veteran of the FBI, makes about $102,000 a year. He moved out of the family home on Father's Day 2005, and his wife filed for divorce in January.
On the night of his drunken driving arrest, F.B.I Agent Robert Clymer was involved in an incident at the Suncoast, police said.
Security guards at the hotel called police about 3:20 a.m. to report a man in the parking lot with a gun.
The man left before officers arrived, but he left behind a 15-round magazine from his gun. Officers matched the magazine to Robert Clymer's gun.
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2003/aug/2 ... el-cooler/
FBI agent pays fine in shooting into hotel cooler
Friday, Aug. 29, 2003 | 9:33 a.m.
An FBI agent who fired two rounds into a walk-in cooler at a Strip hotel in May has paid the Barbary Coast $12,517 for the damage and paid a $105 fine after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge, authorities said.
John Hanson III still faces investigation by his agency, said Special Agent Todd Palmer, spokesman for the FBI Las Vegas office.
Police reports indicate that Hanson, who was in Las Vegas to attend an accounting seminar, was caught on surveillance cameras firing his .45-caliber handgun into the walk-in cooler. No one was inside at the time, although there was a lobster.
Hanson was charged only with a misdemeanor because of the late-night time of the incident, and the fact that the freezer was in a back area with no one inside, District Attorney David Roger said.
"The only victim in that case was a lobster, and Nevada statutes don't provide for attempted murder of a lobster," Roger said.
Roger said Hanson did not receive preferential treatment in court.
"I can tell you anybody else with the same record and same circumstances would have received the same deal," Roger said. "He pleaded straight up to the charge, made restitution and paid the fine."
After the shots, security officers at the hotel detained Hanson, recovered the shell casings and called police, who confiscated the gun. They then called supervisors to tell them an FBI agent was involved in the incident.
The weapon and a copy of the tape were given to another agent, who was in town for the same seminar as Hanson, the police report indicates.
According to the police report, Hanson said he did not remember firing his Glock handgun. Officers cited Hanson with a misdemeanor, discharging a firearm, and released him.
Hanson pleaded guilty to that count June 26 and paid his fine.
Hanson has been an instructor at the FBI training academy in Quantico, Va., but Palmer said he could not say whether Hanson still was on duty. Disciplinary action against Hanson could range from leave without pay to firing.
Link du jour
http://policecrime.proboards.com/
http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg ... m%2002.pdf
http://policecrimes.com/forum/
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED207098
ERIC Number: ED207098
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 1981-May
Pages: 20
Abstractor: N/A
Reference Count: N/A
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
Hale Boggs on J. Edgar Hoover: Rhetorical Choice and Political Denunciation.
Gibson, Dirk
This paper examines United States Representative Hale Boggs's 1971 speech on the House floor, in which he denounced J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for wiretapping members of Congress and infiltrating campus student groups. Following an introduction to the objectives of the paper, the first section reviews Boggs's academic and political career, giving some insight into his personality. The second part discusses the nature of Boggs's 1971 speech and the accuracy of the charges he leveled against Hoover and the FBI. The third part of the paper examines Boggs's motives for denouncing Hoover, speculating as to whether he personally had become a victim of the FBI surveillance that he had denounced and elaborating on Boggs's feelings toward Hoover. In the fourth part, the paper describes the reactions of the House and Senate and of Mr. Hoover to Boggs's allegations. The paper concludes that the object of Boggs's speech was to stir Congress to investigate the FBI in protection of the Bill of Rights, and that the brief but intense rhetoric of his
Authoring Institution: N/A
https://robertscribbler.com/2017/08/18/ ... land-melt/
The Present Threat to Coastal Cities From Antarctic and Greenland Melt
Seas around the world are rising now at a rate of about 3.3 millimeters per year. This rate of rise is faster than at any time in the last 2,800 years. It’s accelerating. And already the impacts are being felt in the world’s most vulnerable coastal regions.
(Rates of global sea level rise continue to quicken. This has resulted in worsening tidal flooding for coastal cities like Miami, Charleston, New Orleans and Virginia Beach. Image source: Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise, and Superstorms.)
Sea Level Rise and Worsening Extreme Rainfall are Already Causing Serious Problems
Last week, New Orleans saw pumps fail as a heavy thunderstorm inundated the city. This caused both serious concern and consternation among residents. Begging the question — if New Orleans pumps can’t handle the nascient variety of more powerful thunderstorms in the age of human-caused climate change, then what happens when a hurricane barrels in? The pumps, designed to handle 1.5 inch per hour rainfall amounts in the first hour and 1 inch per hour rainfall amounts thereafter were greatly over-matched when sections of the city received more than 2 inches of rainfall per hour over multiple hours.
Higher rates of precipitation from thunderstorms are becoming a more common event the world over as the hydrological cycle is amped up by the more than 1 degree Celsius of temperature increase that has already occurred since 1880. And when these heavy rainfall amounts hit coastal cities that are already facing rising seas, then pumps and drainage systems can be stressed well beyond their original design limits. The result, inevitably, is more flooding.
(Dr Eric Rignot, one of the world’s foremost glacial scientists, discusses the potential for multimeter sea level rise due to presently projected levels of warming in the range of 1.5 to 2 C by mid to late Century.)
New Orleans itself is already below sea level. And the land there is steadily subsiding into the Gulf of Mexico. Add sea level rise and worsening storms on top of that trend and the crisis New Orleans faces is greatly amplified.
All up and down the U.S. East and Gulf Coasts, climate change driven sea level rise and a weakening Gulf Stream are combining with other natural factors that can seriously amplify an ever-worsening trend toward more tidal flooding. It’s a situation that will continue to worsen as global rates of sea level rise keep ramping higher. And how fast seas rise will depend both on the amount of carbon that human beings ultimately dump into the Earth’s atmosphere and on how rapidly various glacial systems around the world respond to that insult (see discussion by Dr. Eric Rignot above).
Presently High and Rising Atmospheric Carbon Levels Imply Ultimately Catastrophic Sea Level Rise — How Soon? How Fast? Can We Mitigate Swiftly Enough to Prevent the Worst?
Presently, atmospheric carbon forcing is in the range of 490 parts per million CO2 equivalent. This heat forcing, using paleoclimate proxies from 5 to 30 million years ago, implies approximately 2 degrees Celsius of warming this Century and about 4 degrees Celsisus of warming long term. It also implies an ultimate sea level rise of between 60 and 180 feet over the long term. In other words, if atmospheric carbon levels are similar to those seen during the Miocene, then temperatures are also ultimately headed for those ranges. Soon to be followed by a similar range of sea level rise. In the nearer term, 1.5 to 2 C warming from the 2030s to late Century is enough to result in 20 to 30 feet of sea level rise.
Of course, various climate change mitigation actions could ultimately reduce that larger heat forcing and final related loss of glacial ice. But with carbon still accumulating in the atmosphere and with Trump and other politicians around the world seeking to slow or sabotage a transition away from fossil fuels, then it goes to follow that enacting such an aggressive mitigation will be very difficult to manage without an overwhelming resistance to such harmful policy stances.
(Antarctic ice loss through 2016. Video source: NASA.)
That said, warming and related sea level rise will tend to take some time to elapse. And the real question on many scientists’ minds is — how fast? Presently, we do see serious signs of glacial destabilization in both Greenland and West Antartica. These two very large piles of ice alone could contribute 34 feet of sea level rise if both were to melt entirely.
Meanwhile, East Antarctica has also recently shown some signs of movement toward glacial destabilization. Especially in the region of the Totten Glacier and the Cook Ice Shelf. But rates of progress toward glacial destabilization in these zones has, thus far, been slower than that seen in Greenland and West Antarctica. Present mass loss hot spots are in the area of the Thwaites Glacier of West Antarctica and around the western and southern margins of Greenland.
(Greenland ice loss through 2016. Video source: NASA.)
With global temperatures now exceeding 1 C and with these temperatures likely to exceed 1.5 C within the next two decades, it is certain that broader heat-based stresses to these various glacial systems will increase. And we are likely to see coincident melt rate acceleration as more glaciers become less stable. The result is that coastal flooding conditions will tend to follow a worsening trend — with the most vulnerable regions like the U.S. Gulf and East Coasts feeling the impact first. Unfortunately, there is risk that this trend will include the sudden acceleration of various glaciers into the ocean, which will coincide with rapid increases in global rates of sea level rise. In other words, the trend for sea level rise is less likely to be smooth and more likely to include a number of melt pulse spikes.
Such an overall trend including outlier risks paints a relatively rough picture for coastal city planners in the 1-3 decade timeframe. But on the multi-decade horizon there is a rising risk that sudden glacial destabilization — first in Greenland and West Antarctica and later in East Antarctica will put an increasing number of coastal cities permanently under water.
Rapid Mitigation Required to Reduce Risks
The only way to lower this risk is to rapidly reduce to zero the amount of carbon hitting the atmosphere from human sources while ultimately learning how to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. The present most rapid pathway for carbon emissions reductions involves an urgent build-out of renewable and non-carbon based energy systems to replace all fossil fuels with a focus on wind, solar, and electrical vehicle economies of scale and production chains. Added to various drives for sustainable cities and increasing efficiency, such a push could achieve an 80 percent or greater reduction in carbon emissions on the 2-3 decade timescale with net negative carbon emissions by mid Century. For cities on the coast, choosing whether or not to support such a set of actions is ultimately an existential one.
Links:
Fragmenting Prospects For Avoiding 2 C Warming
NASA Antarctic Ice Loss
Scientists Just Uncovered Another Troubling Fact About Antarctica’s Melting Ice
It Wasn’t Even a Hurricane, But Heavy Rains Flooded New Orleans as Pumps Faltered
Why Seas are Rising Faster in Miami
Miocene Relative Sea Level
Temperature on Planet Earth
Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise, and Superstorms
https://federalnewsradio.com/u-s-news/2 ... ding-woes/
DNA lab reduces testing for missing people amid funding woes
FederalNewsRadio.com
Detectives have had to bust their budgets on expensive testing at private labs or submit remains to lengthy queues at local FBI labs. Others have stored their ...
https://www.truthinjustice.org/taint.htm
Tainting Evidence
by
John F. Kelly and Phillip Wearne
Look what reviewers are saying about TAINTING EVIDENCE
Washington Post/David Burnham
Because most of the critics have aimed their fire at the processing of individual cases brought in geographically dispersed jurisdictions over the last decade or so, however, the collective weight of these negative judgements has not been obvious. Tainting Evidence, a powerful new book by John F. Kelly and Phillip K. Wearne, has now provided this disturbing perspective. The documented failures of the lab, they argue, are not isolated events. Rather, they are strong evidence of systematic rot.
Through extensive interviews, detailed analyses of the FBI’s forensic work in selected cases, and the intense mining of government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Kelly and Wearne persuasively argue that the lab has frequently failed to meet the scientific and ethical standards required of such an important institution. They further contend that when
these problems have been disclosed, the agency’s typical response has been denial and coverup rather than meaningful corrective action. They finally assert that the recent remedial steps ordered by FBI Director Louis Freeh, largely as the result of Whitehurst’s very public disclosures, are not adequate.
Examing how well or poorly a powerful and secretive agency like the FBI performs its work is one of the most difficult and important tasks that any reporter can take on. Kelly and Wearne have met this difficult challenge, successfully documenting a shocking condition that should outrage every American concerned with justice.
From Publisher's Weekly:
The media has familiarized the public with the vocabulary of forensic science: DNA identification, fingerprinting, bomb signatures, etc. However, as journalists Kelly and Wearne make clear in this expos of the FBI crime lab, some of these practices are dubious at best, and any of them is only as effective as the scientist behind it.
The book was prompted by the complaints lodged against the bureau by FBI crime-lab scientist Fred Whitehurst, and the congressional inquiries that arose from his whistle-blowing. The problem Whitehurst identified is twofold. First, the bureau allegedly puts so much faith in its reputation that it refuses to submit to external certification even as it fails to maintain state-of-the-art labs. Second, the FBI lab is said to operate as a good-ol'-boy network, promoting unqualified agents and often taking direction from field investigators.
Kelly and Wearne detail how the FBI crime lab's alleged arrogance and incompetence has, they say, affected the investigation of six high-profile cases, with apparent offenses ranging from laziness and bungling in the Unabomber, O.J. Simpson and Oklahoma City cases to possible perjury in the World Trade Center bombing case and conspiracy to withhold evidence in the investigation of the FBI assault on Ruby Ridge and a series of bomb attacks on federal judges in the late 1980s.
Their book is painstakingly researched and highly detailed. This volume belongs on the reading list of any criminal defense attorney as a road map to the successful cross-examination of forensics experts.
TAINTING EVIDENCE: INSIDE THE SCANDALS AT THE FBI CRIME LAB was nominated for
a Pulitzer Prize.
Whether you are an attorney, forensic scientist, professor, or instructor can you afford to be without this book?
Autographed first edition copies of Tainting Evidence are now available direct from the authors for $20 plus $3.20 priority mail postage which represents an overall discount of 33%. Send checks or money orders to:
John Kelly
1832 Biltmore Street NW
Apt 35
Washington, D.C. 20009
[email protected]
Frank Serpico Portrait by Robert Shetterly
Frank Serpico
Retired Police Detective, Author, Lecturer: b. 1936
"A policeman’s first obligation is to be responsible to the needs of the community he serves…The problem is that the atmosphere does not yet exist in which an honest police officer can act without fear of ridicule or reprisal from fellow officers. We create an atmosphere in which the honest officer fears the dishonest officer, and not the other way around."
http://www.latimes.com/sports/nfl/la-sp ... story.html
White NYPD cop who exposed cops dealing heroin and cocaine
Frank Serpico joins black New York police group supporting Colin Kaepernick
http://newsok.com/mobster-must-serve-fu ... le/5560787
Mobster must serve full sentence despite OKC bombing revelation
NewsOK.com-
Scarpa in early March 2005 spoke to an FBI agent from Colorado about the cache but said he did not yet know the location. That agent took no action, primarily ...
http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/l ... story.html
Pebble Beach 2017: The VW van is back — but this time it's electric
VW says the new all-wheel-drive machine will be able to transport eight passengers and get up to 270 miles of all-battery range.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-plot-t ... er/5544005
MLK Day: The FBI Plot to Kill Martin Luther King: Survived Shooting, Was Murdered in Hospital by FBI
Martin Luther King was murdered in a conspiracy that was instigated by then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Review of William Pepper's Book
By Craig McKee
Global Research, July 23, 2017
This article was first published by GR on September 5, 2016
For one bright moment back in the late 1960s, we actually believed that we could change our country. We had identified the enemy. We saw it up close, we had its measure, and we were very hopeful that we would prevail. The enemy was hollow where we had substance. All of that substance was destroyed by an assassin’s bullet. – William Pepper (page 15, The Plot to Kill King)
The revelations are stunning. The media indifference is predictable.
Thanks to the nearly four-decade investigation by human rights lawyer William Pepper, it is now clear once and for all that Martin Luther King was murdered in a conspiracy that was instigated by then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and that also involved the U.S. military, the Memphis Police Department, and “Dixie Mafia” crime figures in Memphis, Tennessee. These and many more incredible details of the King assassination are contained in a trilogy of volumes by Pepper culminating with his latest and final book on the subject, The Plot to Kill King. He previously wrote Orders to Kill (1995) and An Act of State (2003).
MLK 2
With virtually no help from the mainstream media and very little from the justice system, Pepper was able to piece together what really happened on April 4, 1968 in Memphis right down to who gave the order and supplied the money, how the patsy was chosen, and who actually pulled the trigger.
Without this information, the truth about King’s assassination would have been buried and lost to history. Witnesses would have died off, taking their secrets with them, and the official lie that King was the victim of a racist lone gunman named James Earl Ray would have remained “fact.”
Instead, we know that Ray took the fall for a murder he did not commit. We know that a member of the Memphis Police Department fired the fatal shot and that two military sniper teams that were part of the 902ndMilitary Intelligence Group were sent to Memphis as back-ups should the primary shooter fail. We have access to the fascinating account of how Pepper came to meet Colonel John Downie, the man in charge of the military part of the plot and Lyndon Johnson’s former Vietnam briefer. We also learn that as part of the operation, photographs were actually taken of the shooting and that Pepper came very close to getting his hands on those photographs.
plot to kill king
Unfortunately, the mainstream media has ignored all of these revelations and continues to label Ray as King’s lone assassin. In fact, Pepper chronicles in detail how a disinformation campaign has featured the collaboration of many mainstream journalists over almost half a century. He says he suspects that those orchestrating the cover-up, which continues to this day, are no longer concerned with what he writes about the subject.
“I’m really basically harmless, I think, to the power structure,” Pepper said in an interview.
“I don’t think I threaten them, really. The control of the media is so consolidated now they can keep someone like me under wraps, under cover, forever. This book will probably never be reviewed seriously by mainstream, the story will not be aired in mainstream – they control the media. It was bad in the ’60s but nowhere near as bad as now.”
And the most stunning revelation in The Plot to Kill King – which some may question because the account is second hand – is that King was still alive when he arrived at St. Joseph’s Hospital and that he was killed by a doctor who was supposed to be trying to save his life.
“That is probably the most shocking aspect of the book, that final revelation of how this great man was taken from us,” Pepper says. (By the way, when I quote Pepper as having “said” something I mean in our interview. If I’m quoting from the book, I’ll indicate that.)
The hospital story was told to Pepper by a man named Johnton Shelby, whose mother, Lula Mae Shelby, had been a surgical aide at St. Joseph’s that night. Shelby told Pepper the story of how his mother came home the morning after the shooting (she hadn’t been allowed to go home the night before) and gathered the family together. He remembers her saying to them, “I can’t believe they took his life.”
She described chief of surgery Dr. Breen Bland entering the emergency room with two men in suits. Seeing doctors working on King, Bland commanded, “Stop working on the nigger and let him die! Now, all of you get out of here, right now. Everybody get out.”
Johnton Shelby says his mother described hearing the sound of the three men sucking up saliva into their mouths and then spitting. Lula Mae described to her family that she looked over her shoulder as she was leaving the room and saw that the breathing tube had been removed from King and that Bland was holding a pillow over his head. (The book contains the entire deposition given by Johnton Shelby to Pepper, so readers can judge for themselves whether they think Shelby is credible – as Pepper believes he is.)
Pepper and King.
William Pepper with his friend Martin Luther King.
In fact, a second invaluable source was Ron Adkins, whose father, Russell Adkins Sr., was a local Dixie Mafia gangster and conspirator in the planning of the assassination even though he died a year before it took place. Ron told Pepper he had overheard Bland, who was his family’s doctor, tell his father that if King did survive the shooting he had to be taken to St. Joseph’s and nowhere else. As Pepper describes it:
He remembers Breen Bland saying to his father, ‘If he’s not killed by the shot, just make sure he gets to St. Joseph Hospital, and we’ll make sure that he doesn’t leave.’
Ron, who was just 16 when the shooting took place, was apparently taken everywhere by his father in those days, and he was able to recount many details of what happened as the assassination was planned and carried out.
“I definitely found him credible,” Pepper says. “I found him troubled, I found him disturbed in a lot of ways by things that went on earlier in his life.”
His deposition is also contained in the book, which Pepper explains was important so that readers could judge the statements for themselves.
“What I wanted to do was to make sure that the entire deposition of these critical moments and this critical information was there, so that one could go and read the depositions and see that I was being accurate,” Pepper says.
Besides describing what he heard Bland tell his father, Ron Adkins described the many visits made to Russell Sr. by Clyde Tolson, J. Edgar Hoover’s right hand man. Known to Ron as “Uncle Clyde,” the high-level FBI official often delivered cash to the elder Adkins for jobs he and his associates would carry out on behalf of Hoover. Among those the younger Adkins said were paid to supply information about the activities of Martin Luther King were the reverends Samuel “Billy” Kyles and Jesse Jackson.
The basics of the official story
If you seek out any information from a mainstream source about James Earl Ray, you’ll find him described as the killer of Martin Luther King, just as Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan are labelled “assassins” in the murders of John and Robert Kennedy.
But once you read any or all of Pepper’s three books on the King slaying, you see very clearly that Ray is not a killer at all. Instead, he was a petty criminal who was a perfect “follower.” Like Oswald and Sirhan, Ray was set up to take the fall for an assassination that originated within the American deep state. In fact, Pepper says he’s convinced that knowledge of the plot went all the way to the top.
“The whole thing would have been part of Lyndon Johnson’s playbook,” Pepper says. “I think Johnson knew about this.”
As the official story of the shooting goes, at 5:50 p.m. on April 4, Kyles knocked on the door of room 306 of the Lorraine Motel to let King and the rest of his party know that they were running late for a planned dinner at Kyles’s home. Kyles then walked about 60 feet down the balcony where he remained even after King came out of the room at about 6 p.m. (Although Kyles has maintained ever since that he spent the last half hour in the room, Pepper has proven otherwise.)
Andrew Young and others on balcony of Lorraine motel pointing to where the shot originated while King lies at their feet. (Joseph Louw photo)
Andrew Young (left) and others on balcony of the Lorraine pointing to where the shot originated while King lies at their feet. (Joseph Louw photo)
Members of a militant black organizing group the Invaders, who were also staying in the motel because of King’s visit, were told shortly before the shooting by a member of the motel staff that their rooms would no longer being paid for by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and that they had to leave immediately. When they asked who had given this order, they were told it was Jesse Jackson. At the time of the shooting, Jackson was waiting down by the swimming pool. Ron Adkins also identified Jackson as the person who called the owners of the Lorraine Motel and demanded that King be moved from a more secure inner courtyard room to an exposed room on the second floor facing the street.
The Memphis Police Department usually formed a detail of black officers to protect King when he was in town, but did not this time. Emergency TACT support units were pulled back from the Lorraine to the fire station, which overlooked the motel. Pepper also learned that the only two black members of the Memphis Fire Department had been told the day before the shooting not to report for work the next day at the fire station. And black detective Ed Redditt was told an hour before the shooting to stay home because a threat had been made on his life.
Just about a minute after King exited his room, a single shot was fired and the bullet ripped through King’s jaw and spinal cord, dropping him immediately. The shot appeared to come from across Mulberry Street. King was rushed to hospital, where he was pronounced dead just after 7 p.m.
According to the official story, the shot was fired by Ray from the bathroom of a rooming house above a bar called Jim’s Grill, which backed on to Mulberry and faced onto South Main Street. But, as Pepper’s investigation proves, the shot actually came from the bushes located in between the rooming house and the street. In fact, the only “witness” who placed Ray at the scene was a falling-down-drunk named Charles Stephens, who later did not recognize Ray in a photograph and who cab driver James McCraw had refused to transport a short time before because he was too intoxicated.
The bushes that concealed the shooter were conveniently trimmed the day after the shooting, giving a false impression that a shooter could not have been concealed there. Several witnesses, including journalist Earl Caldwell and King’s Memphis driver, Solomon Jones, described seeing the shot come from the bushes and not from the bathroom of the rooming house as the official story states.
Another casualty of the King murder was cab driver Buddy Butler who reported that he saw a man running from the scene right after the shot, going south on Mulberry St., and jumping into a police car (this would turn out to be MPD Lieutenant Earl Clark). Butler reported this to his dispatcher and later to fellow cab driver Louie Ward. Butler was interviewed at the Yellow Cab Company later that evening by police. Ward was told the next day that Butler had either fallen, or was pushed, to his death from a speeding car on the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge.
The owner of Jim’ Grill, Loyd Jowers, would later admit to being part of the conspiracy to kill King, and he would be found responsible – along with various government agencies – for the killing in a 1999 civil lawsuit by the King family, which was represented by Pepper.
“The King family got enormous comfort out of the results of that trial and the evidence that came forward from that,” Pepper says.
Betty Spates, a waitress at Jim’s Grill and girlfriend of Jowers, says she saw him rush into the back of the Grill through the back door seconds after the shot, white as a ghost and holding a rifle, which he then wrapped in a tablecloth and hid on a shelf under the counter. He turned to her and said, “Betty, you wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, would you?” She responded, “Of course not, Loyd.” Spates, who didn’t come forward until the 1990s, also recounted that Jowers had been delivered a large sum of money right before the assassination.
James McCraw stated that Jowers had shown him a rifle the day after the shooting and told him it was the one used to kill King.
“We confronted Loyd,” Peppers explains. “We told him he was likely to be indicted if he didn’t help us, if he didn’t give more information. Jowers didn’t know there was no way the grand jury was going to indict him. All he knew was what he did, what he participated in, how much money he got for it – he got quite a large sum of money, built a taxi cab company with it, had his gambling debt with [local Mafia figure Frank] Liberto forgiven.”
Liberto, an associate of Louisiana crime boss Carlos Marcello, turned out to be involved in the assassination also. He owned a produce warehouse and one of his regular customers, John McFerren, was making his weekly shopping trip there when he overheard Liberto shout into the phone an hour before the shooting: “Shoot the son of a &!@$# on the balcony.” Nathan Whitlock and his mother, LaVada Addison Whitlock, who owned a restaurant frequented by Liberto, stated that Liberto had told them he was responsible for the King murder.
Setting up the patsy
One thing that many don’t know is that Ray was in prison in 1967, the year before the assassination, serving a 20-year sentence for a grocery store robbery in 1959. After a couple of unsuccessful escape attempts, Ray succeeded in breaking out of prison on April 23, 1967. Unknown to Ray was the fact that the escape had been orchestrated, because he had already been chosen as the patsy in the planned assassination of King, which was still a year away.
The warden of Missouri State Penitentiary was paid $25,000 by Russell Adkins Sr. to allow the escape (as confirmed by Ron Adkins). The money was delivered to Adkins by Tolson, and it was this same connection that would later be used to finance the assassination of King.
After his escape from prison, Ray went to Chicago for a few weeks where he got a job. But, worried about getting caught, he went to Canada, specifically Montreal, and took the name Eric S. Galt. His intention was to get a passport under a false name and to travel to a country from which he could not be extradited.
james earl ray
James Earl Ray spent the last 30 years of his life in prison for a murder he did not commit.
At the Neptune Bar in the Montreal dock area in August 1967, Ray met a mysterious figure who identified himself as “Raul.” Raul asked Ray to help him with a smuggling scheme, and Ray agreed. In the months ahead, Ray would do a number of jobs, including gun running, for Raul for which he was paid and given a car. Always, Ray had to wait to be contacted by Raul, who Ray said co-ordinated his activities right up until the day of the assassination.
At one point Ray was instructed to purchase a deer rifle with a scope (although Raul was not satisfied with the one he bought and made him exchange it for another). Ray was instructed to go to Memphis (he arrived April 3, 1968) and upon meeting with Raul in his motel was given the name of Jim’s Grill, where the two were to meet at 3 p.m. the next day. He also handed the rifle over to Raul and always maintained that he never saw it again.
Ray rented a room at the rooming house above Jim’s Grill (the two met the day of the assassination as planned). About an hour before the shooting, he was given money to go to the movies, but first he tried to have a tire repaired because Raul had said he wanted to use the car. But when Ray heard the sirens that followed the shooting, he got scared and left the area.
Fearing he had been set up, Ray left the country and ended up in England where he was captured on June 8, 1968 at London’s Heathrow Airport as he was trying to leave the UK. Once charged with the crime, Ray was pressured by his second lawyer, Percy Foreman, to plead guilty on the grounds that the evidence was too strong against him and Foreman was not in good health and couldn’t offer a strong defence.
“Foreman was sent in with the purpose of replacing the original lawyers,” Pepper says.
Foreman offered Ray $500 to get another lawyer if he pleaded guilty and even put this in writing. Ray would regret accepting this offer for the rest of his life. He tried unsuccessfully to rescind the guilty plea and get a trial for the next 30 years, finally dying in prison of cancer in 1998.
Pepper becomes convinced of Ray’s innocence
It was 10 years after the assassination before Pepper would even consider meeting with Ray. He had taken for granted at first that Ray was the assassin, but he was encouraged to meet him by Rev. Ralph Abernathy, who had succeeded King as President of the SCLC. Abernathy had remained unsatisfied with the official account of the shooting.
In the book, Pepper describes his first meeting with Ray in 1978 and how he quickly came to believe that Ray had not been the shooter and that the case was essentially still unsolved. It wasn’t until 1988 before Pepper became certain that Ray had not played any knowing part in the conspiracy, and at that point he agreed to represent him, which he did until his death.
Purveyors of the official story of the assassination have always claimed that Raul was an invention of Ray’s, and mainstream media accounts refer to this question as still unanswered even though Pepper not only found witnesses who described their connections to Raul, he actually found Raul himself with the help of witness Glenda Grabow (Pepper learned that his last name was Coelho). She identified Raul as someone she had known in Houston in 1963 and who around 1974, in a fit of rage, had implicated himself in the King assassination right before raping her. Grabow also identified Jack Ruby as someone who she had seen with Raul in 1963. This fascinating story is recounted both in An Act of State and The Plot to Kill King.
One of the most intriguing things to come out of both of these books is the account of a young FBI agent named Don Wilson who after the assassination was sent to check out a white Mustang with Alabama plates (Ray drove a white Mustang) that had been abandoned and that was thought to be connected to the assassination. Wilson opened the car door and some papers fell out. He examined them later and found a torn-out piece of a 1963 Dallas, Texas telephone directory. Written on the page was the name “Raul” and the initial “J” and a phone number, which turned out to be that of a Las Vegas night club run by Jack Ruby, the man who had shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas police station. A second piece of paper had a list of names with amounts of money beside each. Wilson decided to hold on to this evidence, fearing it would disappear forever if he turned it in. He held on to it for 29 years before making it available to Pepper and the King family.
The shooter revealed
Another incredible revelation in The Plot to Kill King is the identity of the man who appears to have fired the fatal shot. Pepper learned his identity from Lenny B. Curtis, who was a custodian at the Memphis Police Department rifle range. Curtis told Pepper this in 2003, and Pepper recorded a deposition with him but kept it confidential out of fear for Curtis’s life. Only after his death in 2013 did Pepper reveal what Curtis had said – that the shooter was Memphis police officer Frank Strausser.
“We had to be very careful about [Curtis’s safety],” Pepper says.
Curtis said to Pepper in his deposition that he heard Strausser say about King four or five months before the assassination that somebody was going to “. . . blow his motherfucking brains out.” He also described that Strausser had practised in the rifle range with a particular rifle that had been brought in four or five days earlier by a member of the fire department. That fireman had shown the rifle to Curtis and asked, “How would you like that scoundrel, that baby there?” When Curtis said it look like any other rifle, he replied, “No, this is a special one; that baby is special.” Lenny remembered that on the day of the assassination, Strausser spent the whole day practicing with it. (Strausser has given several conflicting accounts of where he was and what he was doing that day.)
After the assassination, Curtis says he was followed and intimidated by Strausser. Pepper writes:
Lenny said that he subsequently became aware that strange things were happening around him. His gas was strangely turned on once when he was about to enter his house. He had lit a cigarette, but as he opened the door he smelled gas and quickly put out the cigarette. A strange Lincoln was occasionally parked across the street from his apartment house. He was frightened. One morning when the car was there, he got into his own car and quickly drove off, and the strange car pulled out and followed him. He managed to see the driver. It was Strausser.
In the book, Pepper describes how he came to meet with Strausser, who he describes as a committed and devoted racist.
“He had no respect for black people at all,” Pepper says. “He wasn’t explicit about his racism. But he was not at all sympathetic to what Martin King was all about.”
In the hope of prompting an admission, Pepper lied and told him that he had been implicated in the killing by Loyd Jowers – but Strausser didn’t take the bait. Pepper also told Strausser that the footprints found in the bushes after the shooting were from size 13 shoes (which they were). Then he asked him about the size of his feet:
“He had a bit of a grin on his face, and he said ‘13 large,’” Pepper says.
Pepper also arranged to have cab driver Nathan Whitlock, who Strausser knew, tell him that there was a good possibility that he (Strausser) would be indicted for the shooting. He responded: “What are they going to indict me for, something I did 30 years ago?” Then he caught himself and added, “Or something I knew about 30 years ago?”
A threat to the powers that be
As Pepper explains, King was not only hated by the establishment as he rose to prominence in the 1960s, he was feared. Not only did he have the ability to move large numbers of people with his message of peace and tolerance, but he had designs on a political career. According to Pepper, King was planning to run for president on a third-party ticket with fellow anti-war activist Dr. Benjamin Spock. He was also causing panic in powerful circles because he intended to bring hundreds of thousands of poor people to an encampment in Washington, D.C. in the spring of 1968 to bring attention to the plight of the poor.
“They were terrified that the anger level when [the demonstrators] were not going to get what they wanted was going to rise to such a point where Martin was going to lose control of that group and the more radical among them would take it over and they’d have a revolution,” Pepper explains. “And they didn’t have the troops to put it down. That was a real fear that the Army had. And I think it was a justifiable fear.”
King would also have posed an increasing threat to the political establishment because he intended to become much more vocal in his opposition to the Vietnam War. He had been influenced by an article and photos by Pepper called, “The Children of Vietnam,” which was published in Ramparts Magazine in January 1967 and later reprinted in Look magazine. (The man who published the piece in Look, Bill Atwood, actually told Pepper he received a visit from former New York governor and ambassador to the Soviet Union Averill Harriman who passed on a message from President Johnson that he would appreciate it if Atwood never published anything by Pepper.)
Beyond King’s importance as a powerful force for justice, peace, and equality, he was also Pepper’s friend. And the lawyer/journalist had to deal with that loss as he sought the truth about who really killed King and fought for justice for the man falsely accused of his murder. He writes:
For me, this is a story rife with sadness, replete with massive accounts of personal and public deception and betrayal. Its revelations and experiences have produced in the writer a depression stemming from an unavoidable confrontation with the depths to which human beings, even those subject to professional codes of ethics, have fallen. In addition, there is an element of personal despair that has resulted from this long effort, which has made me even question the wisdom of undertaking this task. (page xiv, The Plot to Kill King)
But he did undertake it, and we should all be grateful that he did.
The original source of this article is Truth and Shadows
FBI Octopus
Atlantic Beach ballot features battles for mayor, commission seats
Florida Times-Union-
Glasser is a retired FBI special agent of 24 years and teaches criminology at the University of North Florida. She's also earned her doctorate in leadership at ...
Show to feature retired Helena FBI agent who helped take down ...
Helena Independent Record-
Retired FBI agent and Helena resident Tom McDaniel will be featured on the CNN show "Declassified" Saturday evening, talking about his and the bureau's ...
New 'Police Stop' curriculum added for new drivers
KREM.com-
Williams is a former FBI agent and federal prosecutor. He is now tasked with educating new drivers on the do's and dont's of traffic stops with his organization, ...
MIHALOPOULOS: Suits linked to Rutherford sex charges cost public ...
Chicago Sun-Times-
With a former FBI agent standing at his side, Rutherford alleged that rival Bruce Rauner was behind false allegations against him by an employee. Rutherford ...
FBI to Host Exclusive Diversity Agent Recruitment Event on August ...
Federal Bureau of Investigation (press release) (blog)-Aug 18, 2017
On the evening of Wednesday, August 30, 2017, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) will host a Diversity Agent Recruitment (DAR) information session at ...
'Operation Lost Trust' exposed public corruption
Greenville News-
When the FBI and state Federal Attorney Bart Daniel began Operation Lost Trust late in 1988, it was directed at drug use among state legislators, but it ...
Online Sleuths Are Outing Racists, But Should They?
Fast Company-
“The FBI routinely asks for the public's assistance in identifying unknown subjects and providing tips to law enforcement,” the agency said in a statement to Fast ...
Story image for fbi from The Missourian
FBI Says No Credible Safety Threats For Eclipse Celebrations
The Missourian-
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) media coordinator Rebecca Wu told The Missourian there have been no credible safety threats to any of the eclipse ...
The Latest: White nationalist contacted about Boston rally
WESTERNMASSNEWS.com-
A self-described white nationalist says he was contacted by a member of the FBI's Joint Terrorist Task Force about helping defuse any violence at what ...
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 1197900035
Public Relations Review
Volume 23, Issue 1, Spring 1997, Pages 11-30
Public Relations Review
A quantitative description of FBI public relations
. Author links open the author workspace.Dirk C.Gibson
Show more
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0363-8111(97)90003-5Get rights and content
Abstract
Of all federal government agencies in the U.S. from the 1930's to the 1980's, the Federal Bureau of Investigation probably had the most successful media relations program. The Bureau's leaders seemed to be masters at getting good publicity and avoiding bad.
By describing a quantitative analysis of the FBI's publicity over that 50-year period, this article attempts to show why those efforts were so successful. It identifies the themes that typified the verbal component of Bureau publicity, and the broad spectrum of mass communication channels that were tapped.
http://policecrime.proboards.com/thread ... -treatment
04/15/2006 - Las Vegas - An FBI agent who pleaded guilty to drunken driving has sued the maker of his pickup because it caught fire after he passed out behind the wheel.
Officer Robert Clymer, who was involved in a high-profile investigation of the Crazy Horse Too strip club, had a blood-alcohol content of 0.306 percent, nearly four times the current legal limit, and was unconscious when Las Vegas firefighters pulled him from his burning truck on Jan. 29, 2005.
The 2004 Chevrolet Silverado had jumped a curb outside a gated community in northwest Las Vegas and began to smoke and caught fire after the engine had been running for a long time, according to a Las Vegas police report.
Police found an empty 25-ounce bottle of Captain Morgan rum on the passenger seat and a SIG Sauer 9 mm pistol in the truck's cab.
F.B.I Agent Clymer, 41, was cited for misdemeanor drunken driving and sent to University Medical Center because of complications from smoke inhalation and intoxication, the report said.
He later pleaded guilty to the charge in Las Vegas Municipal Court and was given a suspended 30-day jail term and 48 hours of community service.
During sentencing in November, Clymer's lawyer said his client wanted to take responsibility for his actions.
"Public officials make mistakes," attorney Gary Booker said. "With public officials, we expect them to own up to their mistakes and correct them. That is exactly what happened in this case."
Two weeks later, F.B.I Agent Clymer filed a product liability lawsuit against General Motors and Bill Heard Chevrolet, who had sold him the truck. He was seeking more than $33,000 in medical bills and nearly $11,000 in lost wages.
The lawsuit says F.B.I Agent Clymer stopped on the side of the road to make a telephone call. He left the engine running and the car in park.
F.B.I Agent Clymer then "somehow lost consciousness" and the truck "somehow produced a heavy smoke that filled the passenger cab," the suit said.
Lawyers for Clymer, GM and Bill Heard Chevrolet did not return phone calls seeking comment. Clymer did not return a phone message left at his office.
The lawsuit was filed about six weeks after Clymer and his wife, FBI secretary Tracy Clymer, filed for bankruptcy. In their bankruptcy papers, the couple said they owed creditors more than $580,700, including nearly $122,000 in credit card debt.
Robert Clymer, a 20-year veteran of the FBI, makes about $102,000 a year. He moved out of the family home on Father's Day 2005, and his wife filed for divorce in January.
On the night of his drunken driving arrest, F.B.I Agent Robert Clymer was involved in an incident at the Suncoast, police said.
Security guards at the hotel called police about 3:20 a.m. to report a man in the parking lot with a gun.
The man left before officers arrived, but he left behind a 15-round magazine from his gun. Officers matched the magazine to Robert Clymer's gun.
https://lasvegassun.com/news/2003/aug/2 ... el-cooler/
FBI agent pays fine in shooting into hotel cooler
Friday, Aug. 29, 2003 | 9:33 a.m.
An FBI agent who fired two rounds into a walk-in cooler at a Strip hotel in May has paid the Barbary Coast $12,517 for the damage and paid a $105 fine after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge, authorities said.
John Hanson III still faces investigation by his agency, said Special Agent Todd Palmer, spokesman for the FBI Las Vegas office.
Police reports indicate that Hanson, who was in Las Vegas to attend an accounting seminar, was caught on surveillance cameras firing his .45-caliber handgun into the walk-in cooler. No one was inside at the time, although there was a lobster.
Hanson was charged only with a misdemeanor because of the late-night time of the incident, and the fact that the freezer was in a back area with no one inside, District Attorney David Roger said.
"The only victim in that case was a lobster, and Nevada statutes don't provide for attempted murder of a lobster," Roger said.
Roger said Hanson did not receive preferential treatment in court.
"I can tell you anybody else with the same record and same circumstances would have received the same deal," Roger said. "He pleaded straight up to the charge, made restitution and paid the fine."
After the shots, security officers at the hotel detained Hanson, recovered the shell casings and called police, who confiscated the gun. They then called supervisors to tell them an FBI agent was involved in the incident.
The weapon and a copy of the tape were given to another agent, who was in town for the same seminar as Hanson, the police report indicates.
According to the police report, Hanson said he did not remember firing his Glock handgun. Officers cited Hanson with a misdemeanor, discharging a firearm, and released him.
Hanson pleaded guilty to that count June 26 and paid his fine.
Hanson has been an instructor at the FBI training academy in Quantico, Va., but Palmer said he could not say whether Hanson still was on duty. Disciplinary action against Hanson could range from leave without pay to firing.
Link du jour
http://policecrime.proboards.com/
http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg ... m%2002.pdf
http://policecrimes.com/forum/
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED207098
ERIC Number: ED207098
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 1981-May
Pages: 20
Abstractor: N/A
Reference Count: N/A
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
Hale Boggs on J. Edgar Hoover: Rhetorical Choice and Political Denunciation.
Gibson, Dirk
This paper examines United States Representative Hale Boggs's 1971 speech on the House floor, in which he denounced J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for wiretapping members of Congress and infiltrating campus student groups. Following an introduction to the objectives of the paper, the first section reviews Boggs's academic and political career, giving some insight into his personality. The second part discusses the nature of Boggs's 1971 speech and the accuracy of the charges he leveled against Hoover and the FBI. The third part of the paper examines Boggs's motives for denouncing Hoover, speculating as to whether he personally had become a victim of the FBI surveillance that he had denounced and elaborating on Boggs's feelings toward Hoover. In the fourth part, the paper describes the reactions of the House and Senate and of Mr. Hoover to Boggs's allegations. The paper concludes that the object of Boggs's speech was to stir Congress to investigate the FBI in protection of the Bill of Rights, and that the brief but intense rhetoric of his
Authoring Institution: N/A
https://robertscribbler.com/2017/08/18/ ... land-melt/
The Present Threat to Coastal Cities From Antarctic and Greenland Melt
Seas around the world are rising now at a rate of about 3.3 millimeters per year. This rate of rise is faster than at any time in the last 2,800 years. It’s accelerating. And already the impacts are being felt in the world’s most vulnerable coastal regions.
(Rates of global sea level rise continue to quicken. This has resulted in worsening tidal flooding for coastal cities like Miami, Charleston, New Orleans and Virginia Beach. Image source: Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise, and Superstorms.)
Sea Level Rise and Worsening Extreme Rainfall are Already Causing Serious Problems
Last week, New Orleans saw pumps fail as a heavy thunderstorm inundated the city. This caused both serious concern and consternation among residents. Begging the question — if New Orleans pumps can’t handle the nascient variety of more powerful thunderstorms in the age of human-caused climate change, then what happens when a hurricane barrels in? The pumps, designed to handle 1.5 inch per hour rainfall amounts in the first hour and 1 inch per hour rainfall amounts thereafter were greatly over-matched when sections of the city received more than 2 inches of rainfall per hour over multiple hours.
Higher rates of precipitation from thunderstorms are becoming a more common event the world over as the hydrological cycle is amped up by the more than 1 degree Celsius of temperature increase that has already occurred since 1880. And when these heavy rainfall amounts hit coastal cities that are already facing rising seas, then pumps and drainage systems can be stressed well beyond their original design limits. The result, inevitably, is more flooding.
(Dr Eric Rignot, one of the world’s foremost glacial scientists, discusses the potential for multimeter sea level rise due to presently projected levels of warming in the range of 1.5 to 2 C by mid to late Century.)
New Orleans itself is already below sea level. And the land there is steadily subsiding into the Gulf of Mexico. Add sea level rise and worsening storms on top of that trend and the crisis New Orleans faces is greatly amplified.
All up and down the U.S. East and Gulf Coasts, climate change driven sea level rise and a weakening Gulf Stream are combining with other natural factors that can seriously amplify an ever-worsening trend toward more tidal flooding. It’s a situation that will continue to worsen as global rates of sea level rise keep ramping higher. And how fast seas rise will depend both on the amount of carbon that human beings ultimately dump into the Earth’s atmosphere and on how rapidly various glacial systems around the world respond to that insult (see discussion by Dr. Eric Rignot above).
Presently High and Rising Atmospheric Carbon Levels Imply Ultimately Catastrophic Sea Level Rise — How Soon? How Fast? Can We Mitigate Swiftly Enough to Prevent the Worst?
Presently, atmospheric carbon forcing is in the range of 490 parts per million CO2 equivalent. This heat forcing, using paleoclimate proxies from 5 to 30 million years ago, implies approximately 2 degrees Celsius of warming this Century and about 4 degrees Celsisus of warming long term. It also implies an ultimate sea level rise of between 60 and 180 feet over the long term. In other words, if atmospheric carbon levels are similar to those seen during the Miocene, then temperatures are also ultimately headed for those ranges. Soon to be followed by a similar range of sea level rise. In the nearer term, 1.5 to 2 C warming from the 2030s to late Century is enough to result in 20 to 30 feet of sea level rise.
Of course, various climate change mitigation actions could ultimately reduce that larger heat forcing and final related loss of glacial ice. But with carbon still accumulating in the atmosphere and with Trump and other politicians around the world seeking to slow or sabotage a transition away from fossil fuels, then it goes to follow that enacting such an aggressive mitigation will be very difficult to manage without an overwhelming resistance to such harmful policy stances.
(Antarctic ice loss through 2016. Video source: NASA.)
That said, warming and related sea level rise will tend to take some time to elapse. And the real question on many scientists’ minds is — how fast? Presently, we do see serious signs of glacial destabilization in both Greenland and West Antartica. These two very large piles of ice alone could contribute 34 feet of sea level rise if both were to melt entirely.
Meanwhile, East Antarctica has also recently shown some signs of movement toward glacial destabilization. Especially in the region of the Totten Glacier and the Cook Ice Shelf. But rates of progress toward glacial destabilization in these zones has, thus far, been slower than that seen in Greenland and West Antarctica. Present mass loss hot spots are in the area of the Thwaites Glacier of West Antarctica and around the western and southern margins of Greenland.
(Greenland ice loss through 2016. Video source: NASA.)
With global temperatures now exceeding 1 C and with these temperatures likely to exceed 1.5 C within the next two decades, it is certain that broader heat-based stresses to these various glacial systems will increase. And we are likely to see coincident melt rate acceleration as more glaciers become less stable. The result is that coastal flooding conditions will tend to follow a worsening trend — with the most vulnerable regions like the U.S. Gulf and East Coasts feeling the impact first. Unfortunately, there is risk that this trend will include the sudden acceleration of various glaciers into the ocean, which will coincide with rapid increases in global rates of sea level rise. In other words, the trend for sea level rise is less likely to be smooth and more likely to include a number of melt pulse spikes.
Such an overall trend including outlier risks paints a relatively rough picture for coastal city planners in the 1-3 decade timeframe. But on the multi-decade horizon there is a rising risk that sudden glacial destabilization — first in Greenland and West Antarctica and later in East Antarctica will put an increasing number of coastal cities permanently under water.
Rapid Mitigation Required to Reduce Risks
The only way to lower this risk is to rapidly reduce to zero the amount of carbon hitting the atmosphere from human sources while ultimately learning how to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. The present most rapid pathway for carbon emissions reductions involves an urgent build-out of renewable and non-carbon based energy systems to replace all fossil fuels with a focus on wind, solar, and electrical vehicle economies of scale and production chains. Added to various drives for sustainable cities and increasing efficiency, such a push could achieve an 80 percent or greater reduction in carbon emissions on the 2-3 decade timescale with net negative carbon emissions by mid Century. For cities on the coast, choosing whether or not to support such a set of actions is ultimately an existential one.
Links:
Fragmenting Prospects For Avoiding 2 C Warming
NASA Antarctic Ice Loss
Scientists Just Uncovered Another Troubling Fact About Antarctica’s Melting Ice
It Wasn’t Even a Hurricane, But Heavy Rains Flooded New Orleans as Pumps Faltered
Why Seas are Rising Faster in Miami
Miocene Relative Sea Level
Temperature on Planet Earth
Ice Melt, Sea Level Rise, and Superstorms
https://federalnewsradio.com/u-s-news/2 ... ding-woes/
DNA lab reduces testing for missing people amid funding woes
FederalNewsRadio.com
Detectives have had to bust their budgets on expensive testing at private labs or submit remains to lengthy queues at local FBI labs. Others have stored their ...
https://www.truthinjustice.org/taint.htm
Tainting Evidence
by
John F. Kelly and Phillip Wearne
Look what reviewers are saying about TAINTING EVIDENCE
Washington Post/David Burnham
Because most of the critics have aimed their fire at the processing of individual cases brought in geographically dispersed jurisdictions over the last decade or so, however, the collective weight of these negative judgements has not been obvious. Tainting Evidence, a powerful new book by John F. Kelly and Phillip K. Wearne, has now provided this disturbing perspective. The documented failures of the lab, they argue, are not isolated events. Rather, they are strong evidence of systematic rot.
Through extensive interviews, detailed analyses of the FBI’s forensic work in selected cases, and the intense mining of government documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Kelly and Wearne persuasively argue that the lab has frequently failed to meet the scientific and ethical standards required of such an important institution. They further contend that when
these problems have been disclosed, the agency’s typical response has been denial and coverup rather than meaningful corrective action. They finally assert that the recent remedial steps ordered by FBI Director Louis Freeh, largely as the result of Whitehurst’s very public disclosures, are not adequate.
Examing how well or poorly a powerful and secretive agency like the FBI performs its work is one of the most difficult and important tasks that any reporter can take on. Kelly and Wearne have met this difficult challenge, successfully documenting a shocking condition that should outrage every American concerned with justice.
From Publisher's Weekly:
The media has familiarized the public with the vocabulary of forensic science: DNA identification, fingerprinting, bomb signatures, etc. However, as journalists Kelly and Wearne make clear in this expos of the FBI crime lab, some of these practices are dubious at best, and any of them is only as effective as the scientist behind it.
The book was prompted by the complaints lodged against the bureau by FBI crime-lab scientist Fred Whitehurst, and the congressional inquiries that arose from his whistle-blowing. The problem Whitehurst identified is twofold. First, the bureau allegedly puts so much faith in its reputation that it refuses to submit to external certification even as it fails to maintain state-of-the-art labs. Second, the FBI lab is said to operate as a good-ol'-boy network, promoting unqualified agents and often taking direction from field investigators.
Kelly and Wearne detail how the FBI crime lab's alleged arrogance and incompetence has, they say, affected the investigation of six high-profile cases, with apparent offenses ranging from laziness and bungling in the Unabomber, O.J. Simpson and Oklahoma City cases to possible perjury in the World Trade Center bombing case and conspiracy to withhold evidence in the investigation of the FBI assault on Ruby Ridge and a series of bomb attacks on federal judges in the late 1980s.
Their book is painstakingly researched and highly detailed. This volume belongs on the reading list of any criminal defense attorney as a road map to the successful cross-examination of forensics experts.
TAINTING EVIDENCE: INSIDE THE SCANDALS AT THE FBI CRIME LAB was nominated for
a Pulitzer Prize.
Whether you are an attorney, forensic scientist, professor, or instructor can you afford to be without this book?
Autographed first edition copies of Tainting Evidence are now available direct from the authors for $20 plus $3.20 priority mail postage which represents an overall discount of 33%. Send checks or money orders to:
John Kelly
1832 Biltmore Street NW
Apt 35
Washington, D.C. 20009
[email protected]
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msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7721
Re: FBI WATCH DO NOT FLY LIST
FBI OCTOPUS
YAWN
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/11/10/g ... the-globe/
Google’s security chief — veteran Navy SEAL and former FBI agent stands guard for Googlers around the globe
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video ... tack.htmls
'60 Minutes' Reveals Undercover FBI Agent On Scene At Garland, TX Terror Attack
Posted By Ian Schwartz
On Date March 26, 2017
On this week's broadcast of CBS News' 60 Minutes, correspondent Anderson Cooper reports an undercover FBI agent tracking jihadists responsible for the Garland, Texas terrorist attack was on the scene prior to the commission of the act.
Anderson Cooper: After the trial, you discovered that the government knew a lot more about the Garland attack than they had let on?
Dan Maynard, ATTORNEY FOR JIHADIST: That’s right. Yeah. After the trial we found out that they had had an undercover agent who had been texting with Simpson, less than three weeks before the attack, to him “Tear up Texas.” Which to me was an encouragement to Simpson.
The man he’s talking about was a special agent of the FBI, working undercover posing as an Islamic radical. The government sent attorney Dan Maynard 60 pages of declassified encrypted messages between the agent and Elton Simpson – and argued “Tear up Texas” was not an incitement. But Simpson’s response was incriminating, referring to the attack against cartoonists at the French magazine Charlie Hebdo: “bro, you don’t have to say that...” He wrote “you know what happened in Paris… so that goes without saying. No need to be direct.”
But it turns out the undercover agent did more than just communicate online with Elton Simpson. In an affidavit filed in another case the government disclosed that the FBI undercover agent had actually “traveled to Garland, Texas, and was present… at the event.”
Dan Maynard: I was shocked. I mean I was shocked that the government hadn’t turned this over. I wanted to know when did he get there, why was he there?
And this past November, Maynard was given another batch of documents by the government, revealing the biggest surprise of all. The undercover FBI agent was in a car directly behind Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi when they started shooting. This cell-phone photo of school security guard Bruce Joiner and police officer Greg Stevens was taken by the undercover agent seconds before the attack.
Anderson Cooper: The idea that he’s taking photograph of the two people who happen to be attacked moments before they’re attacked.
Dan Maynard: It’s stunning.
Anderson Cooper: I mean, talk about being in the right or the wrong place at the right or the wrong time.
Dan Maynard: The idea that he’s right there 30 seconds before the attack happens is just incredible to me.
Anderson Cooper: What would you want to ask the undercover agent?
Dan Maynard: I would love to ask the undercover agent-- Are these the only communications that you had with Simpson? Did you have more communications with Simpson? How is it that you ended up coming to Garland, Texas? Why are you even there?
We wanted to ask the FBI those same questions. But the bureau would not agree to an interview. All the FBI would give us was this email statement. It reads: “There was no advance knowledge of a plot to attack the cartoon drawing contest in Garland, Texas.”
If you’re wondering what happened to the FBI’s undercover agent, he fled the scene but was stopped at gunpoint by Garland police. This is video of him in handcuffs, recorded by a local news crew. We’ve blurred his face to protect his identity.
Dan Maynard: I can’t tell you whether the FBI knew the attack was gonna occur. I don’t like to think that they let it occur. But it is shocking to me that an undercover agent sees fellas jumping out of a car and he drives on. I find that shocking.
Anderson Cooper: That he didn’t try to stop--
Dan Maynard: He didn’t try to stop ‘em. Or he didn’t do something. I mean, he’s an agent, for gosh sakes.
Anderson Cooper: If this attack had gone a different way, and lots of people had been killed, would the fact that an undercover FBI agent was on the scene have become essentially a scandal?
Seamus Hughes: It woulda been a bigger story. I think you would have seen congressional investigations and things like that. Lucky for the FBI and for the participants in the event you know, here in Texas, you know, everyone’s a good shot there.
The FBI’s actions around this foiled attack offer a rare glimpse into the complexities faced by those fighting homegrown extremism. Today, the battle often begins online where identifying terrorists can be the difference between a massacre, and the one that never occurred in Garland, Texas.
Anderson Cooper: People brag about stuff. People talk big. One of the difficulties for the FBI is trying to figure out who’s just talking and who actually may execute an attack.
Seamus Hughes: That’s the hardest part when you talk about this, right. There’s a lot of guys who talk about how great ISIS is. It’s very hard to tell when someone crosses that line. And in most of the cases, you see the FBI has some touchpoint with those individuals beforehand. There had been an assessment, a preliminary investigation or a full investigation. It’s just very hard to know when somebody decides to jump.
https://vault.fbi.gov/media-relations-a ... %2001/view
FBI — Media Relations at FBI HQ and in Field Offices Policy Guide 0809PG Part 01 of 01
https://vault.fbi.gov › view
Media Relations at FBI HQ and in Field Offices Policy Guide 0809PG Part 01 of 01. Media Relations at FBI HQ and in Field Offices Policy Guide 0809PG Part 01 of 01.pdf — PDF document, 18,667 kB (19,115,825 bytes).
Media and Public Relations - FBI-LEEDA
http://www.pcli.org/2011/09/scpd-hosts- ... s-lecture/
By Press Club of Long Island September 18, 2011
SCPD hosts FBI media relations lecture
In response to an incident involving a news cameraman being wrongfully arrested in August, the Suffolk County Police Department held a media relations lecture for its officers this week at the Suffolk County Community College Brentwood Campus.
Penny Parrish, an instructor from the FBI National Academy in Quantico, Virginia, spoke about media relation basics and gave a detailed lecture on procedures and protocol to follow at all levels of enforcement.
Parrish, who was a longtime reporter and public information officer in Minneapolis, said, just an awareness of cameras, and understanding there is a difference between the legacy media and social media and how to use and benefit from each one is helpful.
From communicating with the department’s public information office to dealing with external crises with social media and building helpful relationships with the press, Parrish touched on many issues that have developed across the country between law enforcement and the media.
On an officer level I think it’s important, she said.
Last month, Phil Datz, a news cameraman from Long Island, was arrested while filming the aftermath of a police chase from across the street from the incident on public property with other civilians standing next to him.
The Press Club of Long Island issued a statement demanding the charges be dropped and training be improved by the Suffolk County Police. The Press Club hosted a police and the press panel discussion shortly after.
The Suffolk County Police Department is committed to working with the media to keep the community we serve informed, said Suffolk County
Police Deputy Chief Christopher Bergold. We will be looking to do more of this and increase training in the future.
back door men
Almost two months after releasing details of 23 different secret CIA hacking tool projects under Vault 7 series, Wikileaks today announced a new Vault 8 series that will reveal source codes and information about the backend infrastructure developed by the CIA hackers.
Not just announcement, but the whistleblower organisation has also published its first batch of Vault 8 leak, releasing source code and development logs of Project Hive—a significant backend component the agency used to remotely control its malware covertly.
In April this year, WikiLeaks disclosed a brief information about Project Hive, revealing that the project is an advanced command-and-control server (malware control system) that communicates with malware to send commands to execute specific tasks on the targets and receive exfiltrated information from the target machines….
More here:
https://thehackernews.com/2017/11/cia-h ... -code.html
Link du jour
http://www.pressherald.com/media/video/ ... inside-bm/
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/n ... ise-papers
http://articles.latimes.com/1991-01-20/ ... _red-squad
Big Brother in Blue : PROTECTORS OF PRIVILEGE: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America, By Frank Donner (University of California Press: $34.95; 496 pp.)
January 20, 1991|Bill Boyarsky | Boyarsky is a Los Angeles Times columnist
With the Soviet Union now a friend and the "International Communist Conspiracy" in shambles, the idea of an American police department having a "Red Squad" seems like a waste of money.
Not to the police. The cops love these free-wheeling, elite units. They were ostensibly created to combat terrorism, but have been used mostly to infiltrate and suppress liberal and radical political organizations and civil rights groups. They lift their members out of the routine of police work into something of a James Bond life. As Frank Donner points out in this excellently researched, thoughtful and well-detailed study of police spying, their excesses have been many. But Donner, who directed the American Civil Liberties Project on Political Surveillance, concludes with the chilling thought that the Red squads will be around long after there are any Reds.
Why wouldn't the police like them? The elite Red squads work on their own, usually reporting directly to the chief, operating outside normal department procedures. That's dangerous. Even worse, the squads are concerned more with political attitudes than with crime.
Their targets are chosen according to the narrow, conservative political views of the police and usually are selected in a Keystone Cop fashion. Among the Los Angeles Public Disorder and Intelligence Division (PDID) targets, for example, was the organization advocating help for Soviet Jewry. This was an anti-Kremlin movement, but the intricacies of that obviously were too much for the PDID.
Worse yet, the information, and misinformation, gathered by these sleuths is fed into the growing number of intelligence networks maintained by federal, state and local law-enforcement organizations. In the computer age, if you attend a left-wing meeting in Echo Park, your name is likely to be spread as far as New York.
As Donner points out, the squads are not a recent invention. One of his most important contributions is tracing the history of the Red squads, showing how deeply rooted they are in American political, social and economic life.
They've been with us long before the Soviet Union. In fact, police spying started when the conservative business and political Establishment began fearing revolution in the new American industrial cities after the Paris Commune uprising in 1871.
The first real Red squad was created in Chicago after a bomb was thrown during a meeting of striking McCormack Harvester workers at Haymarket Square in Chicago in 1886. Seven policemen were killed and 70 were injured. "In the subsequent tide of fear and hysteria, Capt. Michael J. Schaack, a fiery foe of trade unionists and anarchists who were prominently involved in the protest, led a witch-hunt and roundup, not only of radicals but also of individuals indentified with the mainstream labor movement who were opposed to anarchism," Donner said.
That set the pattern for the Red squads, a pattern that continues today. Whatever the city, said Donner, the goal and tactics are much the same: "police behavior motivated or influenced in whole or in part by hostility to protest, dissent and related activities perceived as a threat to the status quo."
Los Angeles was important to the development of the squads. As recently as the early '80s, the Los Angeles Police Department's Public Disorder Intelligence Division was revealed as a major rights offender when civil libertarians and reporters disclosed spying on those with liberal political beliefs. Activities that were perfectly legal--admirable, in fact--were targeted for infiltration and disruption by the PDID sleuths. Finally, hit by lawsuits and under fire from the City Council and the Police Commission, the PDID was closed down, and replaced with another unit, possibly more respectful of civil liberties.
Just as Haymarket started Chicago's police on the path of spying, PDID activities were deeply rooted in the anti-union, anti-radical feelings of Los Angeles business. In early Los Angeles, dominated by conservative business and religious leaders, the Red squad became more influential than in most places.
In the '20s and '30s, under the leadership of Capt. William Francis (Red) Hynes, the intelligence squad broke up union and leftist meetings regularly, knocking heads and hustling protesters off to jail. Hynes became a big man in town. "More than any other single individual, Hynes was influential in shaping the modern Red squad and in exploiting the career opportunities of its chief," writes Donner.
Grateful employers slipped Hynes money under the table. His detail got cash payments, too. So effective was Hynes that employers outside the city brought him in to break strikes. In the Imperial Valley in 1934, Donner says, "hundreds of strikers were gassed, clubbed and held incommunicado for weeks on end."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... rump-visit
Hyderabad police round up homeless people before Ivanka Trump visit
Indian city introduces ban on begging in run-up to business summit featuring daughter of US president Donald Trump
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.3622586
Oklahoma woman who married mother pleads guilty to incest, get 10-years' probation
BY ELIZABETH ELIZALDE
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Thursday, November 9, 2017, 6:08 PM
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... ourt-files
Mexico drug cartel's grip on politicians and police revealed in Texas court files
Los Zetas pumped money into elections in the border state of Coahuila but the detailed testimonies have been met with official denial and public apathy
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/man ... -1.3622786
More than 100 demonstrators protest acquittal of NYPD cop cleared in shooting death of Delrawn Small
BY ADAM SCHRADER LEONARD GREENE
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Thursday, November 9, 2017, 8:33 PM
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/n ... ise-papers
Trump ally Robert Kraft revealed as longtime owner of offshore firm
The New England Patriots’ billionaire boss is among several major US sports team owners who appear in the Paradise Papers
by Jon Swaine in New York
http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/c ... -1.3622329
Coral reefs in the waters surrounding Hawaii are bleaching
BY ARIEL SCOTTI
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Thursday, November 9, 2017, 3:57 PM
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... e-to-death
Philippines president says he once stabbed someone to death
http://www.nydailynews.com/newswires/ne ... -1.3622020
Coalition of lawmakers urges NY to end solitary confinement
Thursday, November 9, 2017, 5:36 PM
http://www.denverpost.com/2017/11/08/ne ... f-beijing/
New Delhi a “gas chamber” as Indian capital records pollution reading 10 times that of Beijing
By BLOOMBERG NEWS
PUBLISHED: November 8, 2017 at 11:06 pm | UPDATED: November 9, 2017 at 8:13 am
New Delhi pollution hits dangerous levels
Reuters
https://bangordailynews.com/2017/11/09/ ... r-outages/
Should Maine hold power companies more accountable for outages?
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/sto ... e-1.796271
Why NYPD officer Charlie Becker became the first American cop to get the death penalty
BY JAY MAEDER
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Sunday, August 13, 2017, 10:13 PM
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/ ... sange-case
UK prosecutors admit destroying key emails in Julian Assange case
Correspondence between CPS and its Swedish counterparts about WikiLeaks founder deleted after lawyer retired in 2014
https://bangordailynews.com/2017/11/09/ ... windstorm/
Cleanup continues at Maine harbor smashed by windstorm
YAWN
http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/11/10/g ... the-globe/
Google’s security chief — veteran Navy SEAL and former FBI agent stands guard for Googlers around the globe
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video ... tack.htmls
'60 Minutes' Reveals Undercover FBI Agent On Scene At Garland, TX Terror Attack
Posted By Ian Schwartz
On Date March 26, 2017
On this week's broadcast of CBS News' 60 Minutes, correspondent Anderson Cooper reports an undercover FBI agent tracking jihadists responsible for the Garland, Texas terrorist attack was on the scene prior to the commission of the act.
Anderson Cooper: After the trial, you discovered that the government knew a lot more about the Garland attack than they had let on?
Dan Maynard, ATTORNEY FOR JIHADIST: That’s right. Yeah. After the trial we found out that they had had an undercover agent who had been texting with Simpson, less than three weeks before the attack, to him “Tear up Texas.” Which to me was an encouragement to Simpson.
The man he’s talking about was a special agent of the FBI, working undercover posing as an Islamic radical. The government sent attorney Dan Maynard 60 pages of declassified encrypted messages between the agent and Elton Simpson – and argued “Tear up Texas” was not an incitement. But Simpson’s response was incriminating, referring to the attack against cartoonists at the French magazine Charlie Hebdo: “bro, you don’t have to say that...” He wrote “you know what happened in Paris… so that goes without saying. No need to be direct.”
But it turns out the undercover agent did more than just communicate online with Elton Simpson. In an affidavit filed in another case the government disclosed that the FBI undercover agent had actually “traveled to Garland, Texas, and was present… at the event.”
Dan Maynard: I was shocked. I mean I was shocked that the government hadn’t turned this over. I wanted to know when did he get there, why was he there?
And this past November, Maynard was given another batch of documents by the government, revealing the biggest surprise of all. The undercover FBI agent was in a car directly behind Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi when they started shooting. This cell-phone photo of school security guard Bruce Joiner and police officer Greg Stevens was taken by the undercover agent seconds before the attack.
Anderson Cooper: The idea that he’s taking photograph of the two people who happen to be attacked moments before they’re attacked.
Dan Maynard: It’s stunning.
Anderson Cooper: I mean, talk about being in the right or the wrong place at the right or the wrong time.
Dan Maynard: The idea that he’s right there 30 seconds before the attack happens is just incredible to me.
Anderson Cooper: What would you want to ask the undercover agent?
Dan Maynard: I would love to ask the undercover agent-- Are these the only communications that you had with Simpson? Did you have more communications with Simpson? How is it that you ended up coming to Garland, Texas? Why are you even there?
We wanted to ask the FBI those same questions. But the bureau would not agree to an interview. All the FBI would give us was this email statement. It reads: “There was no advance knowledge of a plot to attack the cartoon drawing contest in Garland, Texas.”
If you’re wondering what happened to the FBI’s undercover agent, he fled the scene but was stopped at gunpoint by Garland police. This is video of him in handcuffs, recorded by a local news crew. We’ve blurred his face to protect his identity.
Dan Maynard: I can’t tell you whether the FBI knew the attack was gonna occur. I don’t like to think that they let it occur. But it is shocking to me that an undercover agent sees fellas jumping out of a car and he drives on. I find that shocking.
Anderson Cooper: That he didn’t try to stop--
Dan Maynard: He didn’t try to stop ‘em. Or he didn’t do something. I mean, he’s an agent, for gosh sakes.
Anderson Cooper: If this attack had gone a different way, and lots of people had been killed, would the fact that an undercover FBI agent was on the scene have become essentially a scandal?
Seamus Hughes: It woulda been a bigger story. I think you would have seen congressional investigations and things like that. Lucky for the FBI and for the participants in the event you know, here in Texas, you know, everyone’s a good shot there.
The FBI’s actions around this foiled attack offer a rare glimpse into the complexities faced by those fighting homegrown extremism. Today, the battle often begins online where identifying terrorists can be the difference between a massacre, and the one that never occurred in Garland, Texas.
Anderson Cooper: People brag about stuff. People talk big. One of the difficulties for the FBI is trying to figure out who’s just talking and who actually may execute an attack.
Seamus Hughes: That’s the hardest part when you talk about this, right. There’s a lot of guys who talk about how great ISIS is. It’s very hard to tell when someone crosses that line. And in most of the cases, you see the FBI has some touchpoint with those individuals beforehand. There had been an assessment, a preliminary investigation or a full investigation. It’s just very hard to know when somebody decides to jump.
https://vault.fbi.gov/media-relations-a ... %2001/view
FBI — Media Relations at FBI HQ and in Field Offices Policy Guide 0809PG Part 01 of 01
https://vault.fbi.gov › view
Media Relations at FBI HQ and in Field Offices Policy Guide 0809PG Part 01 of 01. Media Relations at FBI HQ and in Field Offices Policy Guide 0809PG Part 01 of 01.pdf — PDF document, 18,667 kB (19,115,825 bytes).
Media and Public Relations - FBI-LEEDA
http://www.pcli.org/2011/09/scpd-hosts- ... s-lecture/
By Press Club of Long Island September 18, 2011
SCPD hosts FBI media relations lecture
In response to an incident involving a news cameraman being wrongfully arrested in August, the Suffolk County Police Department held a media relations lecture for its officers this week at the Suffolk County Community College Brentwood Campus.
Penny Parrish, an instructor from the FBI National Academy in Quantico, Virginia, spoke about media relation basics and gave a detailed lecture on procedures and protocol to follow at all levels of enforcement.
Parrish, who was a longtime reporter and public information officer in Minneapolis, said, just an awareness of cameras, and understanding there is a difference between the legacy media and social media and how to use and benefit from each one is helpful.
From communicating with the department’s public information office to dealing with external crises with social media and building helpful relationships with the press, Parrish touched on many issues that have developed across the country between law enforcement and the media.
On an officer level I think it’s important, she said.
Last month, Phil Datz, a news cameraman from Long Island, was arrested while filming the aftermath of a police chase from across the street from the incident on public property with other civilians standing next to him.
The Press Club of Long Island issued a statement demanding the charges be dropped and training be improved by the Suffolk County Police. The Press Club hosted a police and the press panel discussion shortly after.
The Suffolk County Police Department is committed to working with the media to keep the community we serve informed, said Suffolk County
Police Deputy Chief Christopher Bergold. We will be looking to do more of this and increase training in the future.
back door men
Almost two months after releasing details of 23 different secret CIA hacking tool projects under Vault 7 series, Wikileaks today announced a new Vault 8 series that will reveal source codes and information about the backend infrastructure developed by the CIA hackers.
Not just announcement, but the whistleblower organisation has also published its first batch of Vault 8 leak, releasing source code and development logs of Project Hive—a significant backend component the agency used to remotely control its malware covertly.
In April this year, WikiLeaks disclosed a brief information about Project Hive, revealing that the project is an advanced command-and-control server (malware control system) that communicates with malware to send commands to execute specific tasks on the targets and receive exfiltrated information from the target machines….
More here:
https://thehackernews.com/2017/11/cia-h ... -code.html
Link du jour
http://www.pressherald.com/media/video/ ... inside-bm/
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/n ... ise-papers
http://articles.latimes.com/1991-01-20/ ... _red-squad
Big Brother in Blue : PROTECTORS OF PRIVILEGE: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America, By Frank Donner (University of California Press: $34.95; 496 pp.)
January 20, 1991|Bill Boyarsky | Boyarsky is a Los Angeles Times columnist
With the Soviet Union now a friend and the "International Communist Conspiracy" in shambles, the idea of an American police department having a "Red Squad" seems like a waste of money.
Not to the police. The cops love these free-wheeling, elite units. They were ostensibly created to combat terrorism, but have been used mostly to infiltrate and suppress liberal and radical political organizations and civil rights groups. They lift their members out of the routine of police work into something of a James Bond life. As Frank Donner points out in this excellently researched, thoughtful and well-detailed study of police spying, their excesses have been many. But Donner, who directed the American Civil Liberties Project on Political Surveillance, concludes with the chilling thought that the Red squads will be around long after there are any Reds.
Why wouldn't the police like them? The elite Red squads work on their own, usually reporting directly to the chief, operating outside normal department procedures. That's dangerous. Even worse, the squads are concerned more with political attitudes than with crime.
Their targets are chosen according to the narrow, conservative political views of the police and usually are selected in a Keystone Cop fashion. Among the Los Angeles Public Disorder and Intelligence Division (PDID) targets, for example, was the organization advocating help for Soviet Jewry. This was an anti-Kremlin movement, but the intricacies of that obviously were too much for the PDID.
Worse yet, the information, and misinformation, gathered by these sleuths is fed into the growing number of intelligence networks maintained by federal, state and local law-enforcement organizations. In the computer age, if you attend a left-wing meeting in Echo Park, your name is likely to be spread as far as New York.
As Donner points out, the squads are not a recent invention. One of his most important contributions is tracing the history of the Red squads, showing how deeply rooted they are in American political, social and economic life.
They've been with us long before the Soviet Union. In fact, police spying started when the conservative business and political Establishment began fearing revolution in the new American industrial cities after the Paris Commune uprising in 1871.
The first real Red squad was created in Chicago after a bomb was thrown during a meeting of striking McCormack Harvester workers at Haymarket Square in Chicago in 1886. Seven policemen were killed and 70 were injured. "In the subsequent tide of fear and hysteria, Capt. Michael J. Schaack, a fiery foe of trade unionists and anarchists who were prominently involved in the protest, led a witch-hunt and roundup, not only of radicals but also of individuals indentified with the mainstream labor movement who were opposed to anarchism," Donner said.
That set the pattern for the Red squads, a pattern that continues today. Whatever the city, said Donner, the goal and tactics are much the same: "police behavior motivated or influenced in whole or in part by hostility to protest, dissent and related activities perceived as a threat to the status quo."
Los Angeles was important to the development of the squads. As recently as the early '80s, the Los Angeles Police Department's Public Disorder Intelligence Division was revealed as a major rights offender when civil libertarians and reporters disclosed spying on those with liberal political beliefs. Activities that were perfectly legal--admirable, in fact--were targeted for infiltration and disruption by the PDID sleuths. Finally, hit by lawsuits and under fire from the City Council and the Police Commission, the PDID was closed down, and replaced with another unit, possibly more respectful of civil liberties.
Just as Haymarket started Chicago's police on the path of spying, PDID activities were deeply rooted in the anti-union, anti-radical feelings of Los Angeles business. In early Los Angeles, dominated by conservative business and religious leaders, the Red squad became more influential than in most places.
In the '20s and '30s, under the leadership of Capt. William Francis (Red) Hynes, the intelligence squad broke up union and leftist meetings regularly, knocking heads and hustling protesters off to jail. Hynes became a big man in town. "More than any other single individual, Hynes was influential in shaping the modern Red squad and in exploiting the career opportunities of its chief," writes Donner.
Grateful employers slipped Hynes money under the table. His detail got cash payments, too. So effective was Hynes that employers outside the city brought him in to break strikes. In the Imperial Valley in 1934, Donner says, "hundreds of strikers were gassed, clubbed and held incommunicado for weeks on end."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... rump-visit
Hyderabad police round up homeless people before Ivanka Trump visit
Indian city introduces ban on begging in run-up to business summit featuring daughter of US president Donald Trump
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... -1.3622586
Oklahoma woman who married mother pleads guilty to incest, get 10-years' probation
BY ELIZABETH ELIZALDE
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Thursday, November 9, 2017, 6:08 PM
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... ourt-files
Mexico drug cartel's grip on politicians and police revealed in Texas court files
Los Zetas pumped money into elections in the border state of Coahuila but the detailed testimonies have been met with official denial and public apathy
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/man ... -1.3622786
More than 100 demonstrators protest acquittal of NYPD cop cleared in shooting death of Delrawn Small
BY ADAM SCHRADER LEONARD GREENE
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Thursday, November 9, 2017, 8:33 PM
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/n ... ise-papers
Trump ally Robert Kraft revealed as longtime owner of offshore firm
The New England Patriots’ billionaire boss is among several major US sports team owners who appear in the Paradise Papers
by Jon Swaine in New York
http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/c ... -1.3622329
Coral reefs in the waters surrounding Hawaii are bleaching
BY ARIEL SCOTTI
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Thursday, November 9, 2017, 3:57 PM
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... e-to-death
Philippines president says he once stabbed someone to death
http://www.nydailynews.com/newswires/ne ... -1.3622020
Coalition of lawmakers urges NY to end solitary confinement
Thursday, November 9, 2017, 5:36 PM
http://www.denverpost.com/2017/11/08/ne ... f-beijing/
New Delhi a “gas chamber” as Indian capital records pollution reading 10 times that of Beijing
By BLOOMBERG NEWS
PUBLISHED: November 8, 2017 at 11:06 pm | UPDATED: November 9, 2017 at 8:13 am
New Delhi pollution hits dangerous levels
Reuters
https://bangordailynews.com/2017/11/09/ ... r-outages/
Should Maine hold power companies more accountable for outages?
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/sto ... e-1.796271
Why NYPD officer Charlie Becker became the first American cop to get the death penalty
BY JAY MAEDER
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Sunday, August 13, 2017, 10:13 PM
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/ ... sange-case
UK prosecutors admit destroying key emails in Julian Assange case
Correspondence between CPS and its Swedish counterparts about WikiLeaks founder deleted after lawyer retired in 2014
https://bangordailynews.com/2017/11/09/ ... windstorm/
Cleanup continues at Maine harbor smashed by windstorm
-
msfreeh
- Level 34 Illuminated
- Posts: 7721
Re: FBI WATCH DO NOT FLY LIST
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-m ... story.html
Watch the LAPD videos of a controversial police shooting on skid row that have been kept secret for years
see link for Nixon’s FBI Files
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/ ... plication/
January 8, 2018
Why was Richard Nixon’s FBI application rejected?
According to the Bureau’s own files, not even J. Edgar Hoover knew for sure
Written by JPat Brown
Edited by Beryl Lipton
Richard Nixon’s unsuccessful 1937 application to be a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation is a fairly well-known bit of presidential trivia.
But as the Bureau’s own records show, answering the obvious corollary - why wasn’t Nixon FBI material? - isn’t so easy.
It’s not like people weren’t asking, either. The Bureau fielded inquiries from Congressmen, whose constituents were convinced the rejection was due to some hidden defect of Nixon’s character …
from the precocious daughters of former FBI agents …
and from Nixon himself, who reportedly asked Director J. Edgar Hoover about the snub when he became Vice President in 1953.
Hoover reportedly said he’d check the files, and according to the release, he did, starting an investigation into the mysterious rejection a few months later.
So, what happened? Here’s what we know:
On April 23rd, 1937, a 24-year-old Nixon applied to the FBI at the encouragement of one of his professors at Duke Law School. A couple weeks later, the application was accepted by none other than Hoover himself.
Nixon was then interviewed by FBI Special Agent J.H. Hanson, who found him neat, self-confident, and tactful …
though - somewhat ironically for a future Chief Executive - not necessarily cut out for management.
Hanson gave Nixon his enthusiastic approval …
which set in motion the next stage of the application process - an background check with Nixon’s friends and family …
and a full medical exam.
As these records were likely originally processed while Nixon was still alive, the entire details of Nixon’s examination are redacted under FOIA’s b(6) privacy exemption - which unfortunately for the Bureau, puts them in the rather embarrassing situation of “neither confirming nor denying” if a young Nixon had VD.
Regardless, Nixon apparently passed his physical, and his references were pristine as well; everyone praised him as “grade A-1” material, and the closest things to caveats were his old football coach warning that he had a tendency to overwork himself …
and one of his Law Professors, who didn’t want his fine legal mind going to waste at the Bureau.
Nixon, for his part, wanted to at least take the bar examination in California and wanted to defer joining the FBI until he heard the results.
Then things get murky.
Near the end of July, Hoover had sent a request to the Assistant to the Attorney General, asking for the formal approval to bring on Nixon as a Special Agent, with a salary of $3,200 a year. That request had been granted.
Just a little over a week later, however, a new record appeared in Nixon’s application file, with the handwritten note “not qualified.” Accompanying it was the direction “cancel appointment.” That was signed “T,” which indicated it had been written by Hoover’s right hand man in the FBI, Clyde Tolson.
Why the sudden change? Jumping back to Hoover’s investigation in the ’50s, folks in the Bureau were trying to figure that out themselves.
While they were able to nail down August 15th, 1937 as the definite date that Nixon had his offer rescinded, the only reason they could come up with is that Nixon had been disqualified on the grounds he wasn’t immediately available for employment.
Which, again, is just a guess. As the investigation says, “the reason for cancellation of the appointment is not reflected in the file.”
Hoover, apparently not liking that answer, or just eager to pass the blame, offered a different version of events: he had approved Nixon to be an agent, but then Congress didn’t approve the necessary funds, those jerks. This even became a sort of comedy routine between Hoover and Nixon when the former gave an address at an FBI Academy Graduation ceremony in 1954.
The truth comes out eventually, however. In 1969, the Bureau got ahold of a letter sent to then-President Nixon by someone on the special correspondents list with knowledge of the file (likely the former Special Agent with the precocious daughter from earlier), who pointed out that Hoover and Nixon’s version of events weren’t, strictly speaking, true.
Hoover’s response will be familiar to anybody who’s been blocked on Twitter; they kicked the letter writer off the Bureau’s mailing list.
Read Nixon’s full application embedded below and the rest on the request page.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ex- ... -1.3745322
Disgraced NYPD 'Cannibal Cop' releases 'extremely violent' horror novel, hopes to make a living off writing
BY CHRIS SOMMERFELDT
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Updated: Monday, January 8, 2018, 6:31 PM
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/can ... -1.2967342
‘Cannibal Cop’ still visits websites dedicated to eating human flesh: ‘There’s nothing illegal’
BY LARRY MCSHANE
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Updated: Thursday, February 9, 2017, 12:31 AM
Link du jour
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... 1.3745006c
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainmen ... -1.3745166
http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/c ... -1.3745162
Climate change turns most Great Barrier Reef sea turtles female
BY JOE DZIEMIANOWICZ
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Monday, January 8, 2018, 4:48 PM
Trump loses another 300 jobs in the quest to cure Parkinsons
and Alzheimers
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik ... story.html
Column Pfizer, pocketing a big tax cut from Trump, will end investment in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's research
With every passing day, it becomes clearer who’s reaping the benefit of the huge tax cut handed over to American corporations by the Republican-dominated Congress in December.
Spoiler alert: Not workers or customers, but shareholders, especially the rich ones. (Don’t be fooled by those $1,000 bonuses handed out by a few big companies anxious to curry favor with the Trump White House — if they were serious about improving their employees’ lot they’d distribute the money in the form of permanent raises, not a bonus that you can safely bet will be a distant memory by this time next year.)
The big drug company Pfizer seems intent on being a pace-setter in cranking out the benefits of the tax cut to stakeholders who need them the least. In an announcement over the weekend, Pfizer said it was shutting down its research efforts on treatments for Alzheimer’s and Parkinsonism. The company didn’t say how much it was spending on the two conditions, but said about 300 researchers will lose their jobs as it redirects its research and development budget elsewhere.
It’s really alarming to see such a large pharmaceutical company deciding to abandon research into the brain and central nervous system.
— James Beck, chief scientific officer, Parkinson's Foundation
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/ ... t-potluck/
January 8, 2018
Join MuckRock and Boston Hassle on February 8th to celebrate civic engagement
You’re invited to our first ever community meet-and-greet (that also happens to be our eighth birthday)
Written by Beryl Lipton, Grace Raih
Edited by JPat Brown
As we embark upon the journey that will be the Year 2018, we at MuckRock - like you, no doubt - are excited to move forward with a renewed sense of purpose, optimism, and community.
Say what you will about the last 12 months, but it would be hard to deny that they inspired an emotional, political fervor across demographics and interests that left very few feeling as though the United States could not stand to improve itself.
We know you have a lot of feelings about the future of our country and how we’re getting there. There’s a lot that can be gained from conversations across currently-disconnected efforts and much to learn from generous, dedicated individuals working across professional fields and public interest issues across the country and here in the Greater Boston area.
Which is why MuckRock, in coordination with Boston Hassle, would love for you to join us on Thursday, February 8th, 2018 for an evening of conversation, entertainment, and light eats at our first ever Public Interest Potluck.
A PUBLIC INTEREST POTLUCK
Hosted by MuckRock and Boston Hassle
Who: You, please! This is a public event.
When: Thursday, February 8, 2018 6 p.m. - 9 p.m.
Where: The Garment District 200 Broadway Cambridge, MA 02139
Why: To meet others interested in public interest opportunities and to learn about nonprofit and community betterment efforts in Massachusetts.
What to bring: Yourself! You’re welcome to bring food to share, but we’re primarily interested in hearing about your work or > the work you believe needs to get done.
If you’re interested in having table or space for materials at this event, or if you would like a short time slot to address attendees about your work, please let us know! We would love that.
We’re bringing together community members, activists, academics, and aspiring civic participants of all ages to talk about what they’re working on and what they would like to see going forward. We’ll have very short introductions from some of our guests with music and food and opportunities to get involved.
Please come share an idea or impression and learn about the buffet of ways people in our neighborhoods are exchanging and using information.
For nearly eight years, MuckRock has been working to build the tools individuals need to engage with their government and hold it accountable. We’ve had the amazing opportunity to work and talk with some extraordinary people across disciplines, backgrounds, political agendas, and experiences, all using a little hope - and maybe some indignation - to insist that the arc of the universe bend a bit further toward justice. We hope you’ll come join the discussion and that we’ll see you on February 8!
Please RSVP via our eventbrite page or via the form below, and if you’re a nonprofit or community group interested in officially attending the event, please let us know at [email protected].
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-p ... story.html
Trump administration plan to prop up coal and nuclear markets rejected by regulators
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencen ... story.html
Why the United States is 'the most dangerous of wealthy nations for a child to be born into'
http://www.nydailynews.com/newswires/ne ... -1.3745364
Puerto Rico police chief resigns as killings, absences spike
Monday, January 8, 2018, 7:59 PM
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico
— Puerto Rico's first female police chief resigned Monday amid a spike in killings while thousands of officers continue to call in sick to protest the lack of overtime pay.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politic ... -1.3745550
Kansas Republican falsely claims 'genetics' cause African-Americans to get hooked on drugs
BY CHRIS SOMMERFELDT
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Updated: Monday, January 8, 2018, 8:44 PM
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/ ... rs-antifa/
January 8, 2018
Homeland Security reports show overwhelming focus on violence from the left, while downplaying threat from white supremacists
Officer at the Nevada fusion center questions Southern Poverty Law Center’s credibility due to “donors like George Soros”
Written by Curtis Waltman
Edited by JPat Brown
Homeland Security-run fusion centers are often criticized for keeping tabs on activist groups, particularly those that are demonstrably non-violent. That criticism is reinforced by a series of public records requests sent by the author to each of the 70 plus fusion centers in the country, asking for any reports regarding both Antifa and other leftist-alligned groups, as well as “alt-right” and outright white supremacist organizations.
Only a handful of fusion centers have so far actually provided records to MuckRock, and of those, produced reports overwhelmingly focused on the left. Take this email from the Nevada Threat Analysis Center, for example.
This shows that agency keeping detailed tabs on the proposed National Strike in protest against President Donald Trump’s Muslim Ban last year. Note the analyst comment blaming Antifa for “recent violence,” and the attention given to Palestine Legal. Despite being as non-violent as protests get, it’s quite clear that the agency was monitoring the event closely.
In the ensuing pages, there are several questions about Antifa, people protesting ICE vans, anarchist groups, and several requests to monitor May Day.
Most alarming is this email concerning the National Alliance Reform and Restoration Group, an inconspicuously named white supremacist group headquartered in Carson City.
For starters, it is shocking that the NTAC had not been paying attention to a white supremacist group operating within their state - but what’s really incredible is the dig at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s crediblity because of some of their donors, namely one George Soros.
Kentucky Fusion Center, however, had no records regarding white supremacist groups, and instead released a single report on Antifa, which categorized the group’s activities as organized crime. This is despite the SPLC identifying 17 hate groups operating within the state.
This is despite the SPLC identifying 17 hate groups operating within the state.
Are things better in Liberal bastion California? Not really. Continuing the trend, the Central California Intelligence Center was largely focused on the threat from “anarchist extremists” …
with one CCIC report calling Antifa “the greatest threat to public safety,” despite the presence of actual Neo-Nazis at these events.
While another 17 fusion centers just outright rejected our request, and many others still haven’t responded, just from these three examples we can clearly see a pattern forming. Despite this being an era of rising hate crime, fusion centers spend a lot of time tracking activist groups and protesters, while not seeming to spend much time monitoring white supremacist groups.
And as last year’s events in Portland, Oregon, Charlottesville, Virginia, and the University of Maryland have shown, downplaying that threat can have deadly consequences.
Read the CCIC’s release embedded below, and the rest on the competed requests here.
Image by Pax Ahimsa Gethen via Wikimedia Commons and is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
Share
TAGS
anarchism antifa california dhs emails fusion centers george soros hate groups homeland security kentucky nevada protests southern poverty law center terrorism
RELATED REQUESTS
Completed
2 files
Antifa and White Supremacist Groups (Kentucky Fusion Center)
Curtis Waltman sent this request to the Kentucky Intelligence Fusion Center of Kentucky
Completed
2 files
Antifa and White Supremacist Groups (Nevada Threat Analysis Center)
Curtis Waltman sent this request to the Nevada Threat Analysis Center of Nevada
Completed
4 files
Antifa and White Supremacist Groups (Sacramento Regional Threat Assessment Center)
Curtis Waltman sent this request to the Central California Intelligence Center of California
Watch the LAPD videos of a controversial police shooting on skid row that have been kept secret for years
see link for Nixon’s FBI Files
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/ ... plication/
January 8, 2018
Why was Richard Nixon’s FBI application rejected?
According to the Bureau’s own files, not even J. Edgar Hoover knew for sure
Written by JPat Brown
Edited by Beryl Lipton
Richard Nixon’s unsuccessful 1937 application to be a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation is a fairly well-known bit of presidential trivia.
But as the Bureau’s own records show, answering the obvious corollary - why wasn’t Nixon FBI material? - isn’t so easy.
It’s not like people weren’t asking, either. The Bureau fielded inquiries from Congressmen, whose constituents were convinced the rejection was due to some hidden defect of Nixon’s character …
from the precocious daughters of former FBI agents …
and from Nixon himself, who reportedly asked Director J. Edgar Hoover about the snub when he became Vice President in 1953.
Hoover reportedly said he’d check the files, and according to the release, he did, starting an investigation into the mysterious rejection a few months later.
So, what happened? Here’s what we know:
On April 23rd, 1937, a 24-year-old Nixon applied to the FBI at the encouragement of one of his professors at Duke Law School. A couple weeks later, the application was accepted by none other than Hoover himself.
Nixon was then interviewed by FBI Special Agent J.H. Hanson, who found him neat, self-confident, and tactful …
though - somewhat ironically for a future Chief Executive - not necessarily cut out for management.
Hanson gave Nixon his enthusiastic approval …
which set in motion the next stage of the application process - an background check with Nixon’s friends and family …
and a full medical exam.
As these records were likely originally processed while Nixon was still alive, the entire details of Nixon’s examination are redacted under FOIA’s b(6) privacy exemption - which unfortunately for the Bureau, puts them in the rather embarrassing situation of “neither confirming nor denying” if a young Nixon had VD.
Regardless, Nixon apparently passed his physical, and his references were pristine as well; everyone praised him as “grade A-1” material, and the closest things to caveats were his old football coach warning that he had a tendency to overwork himself …
and one of his Law Professors, who didn’t want his fine legal mind going to waste at the Bureau.
Nixon, for his part, wanted to at least take the bar examination in California and wanted to defer joining the FBI until he heard the results.
Then things get murky.
Near the end of July, Hoover had sent a request to the Assistant to the Attorney General, asking for the formal approval to bring on Nixon as a Special Agent, with a salary of $3,200 a year. That request had been granted.
Just a little over a week later, however, a new record appeared in Nixon’s application file, with the handwritten note “not qualified.” Accompanying it was the direction “cancel appointment.” That was signed “T,” which indicated it had been written by Hoover’s right hand man in the FBI, Clyde Tolson.
Why the sudden change? Jumping back to Hoover’s investigation in the ’50s, folks in the Bureau were trying to figure that out themselves.
While they were able to nail down August 15th, 1937 as the definite date that Nixon had his offer rescinded, the only reason they could come up with is that Nixon had been disqualified on the grounds he wasn’t immediately available for employment.
Which, again, is just a guess. As the investigation says, “the reason for cancellation of the appointment is not reflected in the file.”
Hoover, apparently not liking that answer, or just eager to pass the blame, offered a different version of events: he had approved Nixon to be an agent, but then Congress didn’t approve the necessary funds, those jerks. This even became a sort of comedy routine between Hoover and Nixon when the former gave an address at an FBI Academy Graduation ceremony in 1954.
The truth comes out eventually, however. In 1969, the Bureau got ahold of a letter sent to then-President Nixon by someone on the special correspondents list with knowledge of the file (likely the former Special Agent with the precocious daughter from earlier), who pointed out that Hoover and Nixon’s version of events weren’t, strictly speaking, true.
Hoover’s response will be familiar to anybody who’s been blocked on Twitter; they kicked the letter writer off the Bureau’s mailing list.
Read Nixon’s full application embedded below and the rest on the request page.
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ex- ... -1.3745322
Disgraced NYPD 'Cannibal Cop' releases 'extremely violent' horror novel, hopes to make a living off writing
BY CHRIS SOMMERFELDT
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Updated: Monday, January 8, 2018, 6:31 PM
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/can ... -1.2967342
‘Cannibal Cop’ still visits websites dedicated to eating human flesh: ‘There’s nothing illegal’
BY LARRY MCSHANE
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Updated: Thursday, February 9, 2017, 12:31 AM
Link du jour
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nationa ... 1.3745006c
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainmen ... -1.3745166
http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/c ... -1.3745162
Climate change turns most Great Barrier Reef sea turtles female
BY JOE DZIEMIANOWICZ
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Monday, January 8, 2018, 4:48 PM
Trump loses another 300 jobs in the quest to cure Parkinsons
and Alzheimers
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik ... story.html
Column Pfizer, pocketing a big tax cut from Trump, will end investment in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's research
With every passing day, it becomes clearer who’s reaping the benefit of the huge tax cut handed over to American corporations by the Republican-dominated Congress in December.
Spoiler alert: Not workers or customers, but shareholders, especially the rich ones. (Don’t be fooled by those $1,000 bonuses handed out by a few big companies anxious to curry favor with the Trump White House — if they were serious about improving their employees’ lot they’d distribute the money in the form of permanent raises, not a bonus that you can safely bet will be a distant memory by this time next year.)
The big drug company Pfizer seems intent on being a pace-setter in cranking out the benefits of the tax cut to stakeholders who need them the least. In an announcement over the weekend, Pfizer said it was shutting down its research efforts on treatments for Alzheimer’s and Parkinsonism. The company didn’t say how much it was spending on the two conditions, but said about 300 researchers will lose their jobs as it redirects its research and development budget elsewhere.
It’s really alarming to see such a large pharmaceutical company deciding to abandon research into the brain and central nervous system.
— James Beck, chief scientific officer, Parkinson's Foundation
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/ ... t-potluck/
January 8, 2018
Join MuckRock and Boston Hassle on February 8th to celebrate civic engagement
You’re invited to our first ever community meet-and-greet (that also happens to be our eighth birthday)
Written by Beryl Lipton, Grace Raih
Edited by JPat Brown
As we embark upon the journey that will be the Year 2018, we at MuckRock - like you, no doubt - are excited to move forward with a renewed sense of purpose, optimism, and community.
Say what you will about the last 12 months, but it would be hard to deny that they inspired an emotional, political fervor across demographics and interests that left very few feeling as though the United States could not stand to improve itself.
We know you have a lot of feelings about the future of our country and how we’re getting there. There’s a lot that can be gained from conversations across currently-disconnected efforts and much to learn from generous, dedicated individuals working across professional fields and public interest issues across the country and here in the Greater Boston area.
Which is why MuckRock, in coordination with Boston Hassle, would love for you to join us on Thursday, February 8th, 2018 for an evening of conversation, entertainment, and light eats at our first ever Public Interest Potluck.
A PUBLIC INTEREST POTLUCK
Hosted by MuckRock and Boston Hassle
Who: You, please! This is a public event.
When: Thursday, February 8, 2018 6 p.m. - 9 p.m.
Where: The Garment District 200 Broadway Cambridge, MA 02139
Why: To meet others interested in public interest opportunities and to learn about nonprofit and community betterment efforts in Massachusetts.
What to bring: Yourself! You’re welcome to bring food to share, but we’re primarily interested in hearing about your work or > the work you believe needs to get done.
If you’re interested in having table or space for materials at this event, or if you would like a short time slot to address attendees about your work, please let us know! We would love that.
We’re bringing together community members, activists, academics, and aspiring civic participants of all ages to talk about what they’re working on and what they would like to see going forward. We’ll have very short introductions from some of our guests with music and food and opportunities to get involved.
Please come share an idea or impression and learn about the buffet of ways people in our neighborhoods are exchanging and using information.
For nearly eight years, MuckRock has been working to build the tools individuals need to engage with their government and hold it accountable. We’ve had the amazing opportunity to work and talk with some extraordinary people across disciplines, backgrounds, political agendas, and experiences, all using a little hope - and maybe some indignation - to insist that the arc of the universe bend a bit further toward justice. We hope you’ll come join the discussion and that we’ll see you on February 8!
Please RSVP via our eventbrite page or via the form below, and if you’re a nonprofit or community group interested in officially attending the event, please let us know at [email protected].
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-p ... story.html
Trump administration plan to prop up coal and nuclear markets rejected by regulators
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencen ... story.html
Why the United States is 'the most dangerous of wealthy nations for a child to be born into'
http://www.nydailynews.com/newswires/ne ... -1.3745364
Puerto Rico police chief resigns as killings, absences spike
Monday, January 8, 2018, 7:59 PM
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico
— Puerto Rico's first female police chief resigned Monday amid a spike in killings while thousands of officers continue to call in sick to protest the lack of overtime pay.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politic ... -1.3745550
Kansas Republican falsely claims 'genetics' cause African-Americans to get hooked on drugs
BY CHRIS SOMMERFELDT
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Updated: Monday, January 8, 2018, 8:44 PM
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/ ... rs-antifa/
January 8, 2018
Homeland Security reports show overwhelming focus on violence from the left, while downplaying threat from white supremacists
Officer at the Nevada fusion center questions Southern Poverty Law Center’s credibility due to “donors like George Soros”
Written by Curtis Waltman
Edited by JPat Brown
Homeland Security-run fusion centers are often criticized for keeping tabs on activist groups, particularly those that are demonstrably non-violent. That criticism is reinforced by a series of public records requests sent by the author to each of the 70 plus fusion centers in the country, asking for any reports regarding both Antifa and other leftist-alligned groups, as well as “alt-right” and outright white supremacist organizations.
Only a handful of fusion centers have so far actually provided records to MuckRock, and of those, produced reports overwhelmingly focused on the left. Take this email from the Nevada Threat Analysis Center, for example.
This shows that agency keeping detailed tabs on the proposed National Strike in protest against President Donald Trump’s Muslim Ban last year. Note the analyst comment blaming Antifa for “recent violence,” and the attention given to Palestine Legal. Despite being as non-violent as protests get, it’s quite clear that the agency was monitoring the event closely.
In the ensuing pages, there are several questions about Antifa, people protesting ICE vans, anarchist groups, and several requests to monitor May Day.
Most alarming is this email concerning the National Alliance Reform and Restoration Group, an inconspicuously named white supremacist group headquartered in Carson City.
For starters, it is shocking that the NTAC had not been paying attention to a white supremacist group operating within their state - but what’s really incredible is the dig at the Southern Poverty Law Center’s crediblity because of some of their donors, namely one George Soros.
Kentucky Fusion Center, however, had no records regarding white supremacist groups, and instead released a single report on Antifa, which categorized the group’s activities as organized crime. This is despite the SPLC identifying 17 hate groups operating within the state.
This is despite the SPLC identifying 17 hate groups operating within the state.
Are things better in Liberal bastion California? Not really. Continuing the trend, the Central California Intelligence Center was largely focused on the threat from “anarchist extremists” …
with one CCIC report calling Antifa “the greatest threat to public safety,” despite the presence of actual Neo-Nazis at these events.
While another 17 fusion centers just outright rejected our request, and many others still haven’t responded, just from these three examples we can clearly see a pattern forming. Despite this being an era of rising hate crime, fusion centers spend a lot of time tracking activist groups and protesters, while not seeming to spend much time monitoring white supremacist groups.
And as last year’s events in Portland, Oregon, Charlottesville, Virginia, and the University of Maryland have shown, downplaying that threat can have deadly consequences.
Read the CCIC’s release embedded below, and the rest on the competed requests here.
Image by Pax Ahimsa Gethen via Wikimedia Commons and is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
Share
TAGS
anarchism antifa california dhs emails fusion centers george soros hate groups homeland security kentucky nevada protests southern poverty law center terrorism
RELATED REQUESTS
Completed
2 files
Antifa and White Supremacist Groups (Kentucky Fusion Center)
Curtis Waltman sent this request to the Kentucky Intelligence Fusion Center of Kentucky
Completed
2 files
Antifa and White Supremacist Groups (Nevada Threat Analysis Center)
Curtis Waltman sent this request to the Nevada Threat Analysis Center of Nevada
Completed
4 files
Antifa and White Supremacist Groups (Sacramento Regional Threat Assessment Center)
Curtis Waltman sent this request to the Central California Intelligence Center of California
